This exchange is from today’s Senate hearing on NIL compensation.
Tester’s from Montana. Just sayin’, Mandel.
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UPDATE: Oy.
Dude’s on a real roll.
Daily Archives: June 17, 2021
Say you’re not a college athletics fan without saying you’re not a college athletics fan.
Filed under The NCAA
Todd Monken’s first world problem
Sometimes, life’s a beyotch.
Rare is the season when each and every one of a team’s scholarship running backs return for a second consecutive year.
In the advent of the NCAA transfer portal, this is especially true. But not at Georgia; at least not in the running back room.
All five of the Bulldogs’ scholarship running backs were ranked as either four- or five-star recruits coming out of high school, giving Kirby Smart and offensive coordinator Todd Monken one of the deepest units in the nation.
The question is, how does Monken plan to distribute the ball?
I have a feeling he’ll manage.
Snark aside, this is all a good reason to run your offense a little more quickly so that you generate more offensive plays per game, as well as keeping your foot on the gas in the second half to get all your offensive players more touches. Then there’s always the nice luxury of depth when it comes to injuries. We shall see.
(By the way, it’s good to see the news that both McIntosh and Milton are fully healthy.)
Filed under Georgia Football
The portal — you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it.
Shot ($$).
“Do you want an honest answer on that? I can give you the stock answer, which is indifferent. But as every coach in the SEC wouldn’t admit, it’s based on who they can get with how they want that rule,” Smart said. “It’s a selfish world out there and every guy is trying to do what gives his team the best chance to win.”
Chaser.
“I do know this, that I’m for the portal,” Pittman said. “I think if a kid doesn’t want to be on our team then he doesn’t need to be on our team, and it’s not because of me, it’s because of his teammates. So I’m all for that. At the end of the day, if they don’t want to be here, then they need to go somewhere else.”
Filed under Transfers Are For Coaches.
Mama, I got ‘dem selection committee blues.
Somebody’s saying something that’s music to Kirby Smart’s ears ($$).
“People need to play good games and not worry that one loss to a formidable opponent ends that team’s chances of getting into the Playoff — or two losses.” said Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione…
Sure thing, Joe. I’m sure all those ADs who need the revenue from those home cupcake games are gonna jump all over your suggestion there and start loading up on non-conference home-and-homes (like Georgia is, admittedly). Also, pay no attention to the fact that no two-loss team has made the CFP so far (although, admittedly again, that becomes more likely filling a 12-team field).
I will believe in this brave new world when Bill Hancock insists the committee won’t take it into account. Just kidding… I think.
By the way, the article mentions that there is talk to expand the selection committee “to gain additional perspectives”. I mean, why not? It’s nice work, if you can get it. Although they’re gonna need a bigger hat rack.
Filed under BCS/Playoffs
“… it’s karma. You reap what you sow.”
Jesus, these people were brazen.
Earlier this month, an anonymous person sent a dossier of dozens of pages to the Arizona State athletic department. It included screenshots, receipts, pictures and emails related to numerous potential violations within Arizona State’s football program, according to sources.
… The documentation includes specific evidence of multiple examples of high school prospects taking illicit on-campus recruiting trips to the Arizona State campus. Those came during the pandemic-inspired dead period that ended June 1. For more than a year prior, NCAA rules explicitly banned players from visiting on campus because of COVID-19. The dossier, according to sources, lays out pieces of both the players’ trips to campus and how those trips were paid for.
Sources said members of the football program deliberately, blatantly and consistently broke rules related to hosting players during the dead period, including coach Herm Edwards meeting with recruits. A source added that the evidence included pictures of the visits, including Edwards with a recruit who ended up enrolling at ASU.
They’ve got the receipts, in other words. Not that it sounds like it was very hard digging them up.
… Multiple sources indicated that at least 30 players visited campus over a span of months, a practice so common coaches referenced “official visit weekends” in staff meetings, coaches bumped into recruits and families in a back stairwell and a routine developed of facility tours being given around 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. at night.
On one weekend in October, there were so many high school kids visiting that a staff member parked a 12-person van in the staff parking lot to tour around recruits. The visits spanned months, sources said, including some in October, the weekend of the UCLA game in December and through the spring game, which one source said “was like an official visit weekend.”
“It wasn’t a secret,” said a staff member with direct knowledge of the visits. “As far as knowing everyone who came into that [football] office, the number is too big and the names are too many. They would bring in parents, their moms and dads and friends. They’d get a facility tour like they were on an official visit. They’d show you the weight room and training room. They’d show you everything.”
My only question is how is ASU not in the SEC? This is like “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin'” on steroids. Jeremy Pruitt can only shake his head in admiration.
Filed under Pac-12 Football, Recruiting
Forget it, Mark. It’s Washington.
Let’s see… the NCAA’s got two weeks to get Congress to pass a bill for the POTUS to sign into law overriding the states’ intrusion into college athletes’ NIL compensation. How’s that going, anyway?
The faint hope that Congress would pass a bill by July 1 to govern athlete compensation died long ago. Now, the hope that such legislation will get passed by the end of the calendar year is dwindling, too.
Notable Republican senators are not expected to participate in the latest Senate hearing Thursday over athlete compensation, a strong signal of the growing divide between the two sides over an issue that has sparked a sweeping, nationwide movement of state laws threatening the equitability of NCAA sports.
The Senate Commerce Committee, the group with jurisdiction over the topic, is scheduled to hold a hearing on athletes’ rights eight days after the last hearing ended without marked progress toward federal legislation. Thursday’s hearing is different, for two reasons, from the other six held on Capitol Hill over the last 16 months: College athletes will serve as witnesses and the top Republicans will not be in attendance.
The hearing, led by the Senate’s majority party, the Democrats, is expected to be absent of many of the Commerce Committee’s minority members, legislative aides tell Sports Illustrated. Those include, most notably, senators Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) and Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), the two Conservative members of a five-person, bipartisan working group exploring a compromise on a federal bill to govern how college athletes earn money from their name, image and likeness (NIL).
Wicker wants to conduct a survey of athletes, which is nice, but hardly a path to getting action before month’s end. And then there’s this bigger holdup:
At the center of the delay, sources say, is a request from Republicans to grant the NCAA antitrust protection from retroactive and future lawsuits over NIL—something deeply opposed by Booker and Blumenthal.
Yeah, that’s gonna happen quickly. Good job on the lobbying, Mr. Emmert.
All that’s left between now and July 1 are two things: (1) the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alston, which could happen any day now and is likely the only realistic last gasp possibility for an antitrust exemption and (2) the NCAA’s passage of its own “amateurism is what we say it is at any given moment” change to NIL compensation eligibility rules. The latter is likely to be more restrictive than what the states have passed (although remember that it would have the effect of voiding Georgia’s law), but at least it will provide a level national floor, for what that’s worth.
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UPDATE: In case you had any doubt…
The suspense was killing me.
Filed under Political Wankery, The NCAA
Musical palate cleanser, 12-string guitar and harmonies edition
From the great Children of Nuggets collection, here’s Sweden’s finest, The Sinners, with “Barbed Wire Heart”, featuring two things that always make my musical heart go shwing!.
Man, that chorus…
Filed under Uncategorized
Get The Picture 