“You buy a keg for $75 and sell it for $1,400.”

My favorite part of the booze industry’s rapid takeover of college sports marketing is the statement of the obvious — “It’s the inevitability of the profitability, which is extraordinary” — coupled with the traditional “don’t let alcohol near the innocent young” sanctimony, with the SEC naturally leading the way:

With the rise in beer marketing has come a level of inconsistency and, sometimes, hypocrisy as schools and conferences try to figure out how much to regulate it. Where there’s a restriction on beer sales or marketing at a college facility, there’s often a contradiction nearby.

The SEC has been adamant about not selling any alcoholic beverages at its athletic venues, but the conference does allow it in club seats and suites, at least one of which is sponsored by a spirits brand — Woodford Reserve Club at Kentucky’s Kroger Field. Other schools, such as LSU and Missouri, have experimented with selling beer within beer gardens just outside the stadium, which enables them to rake in the revenue while staying within the bounds of the conference rules.

That’s your SEC today, peeps:  no beer sales in the stands, but bourbon-infused naming in the club seats.  Still, those sweet, sweet liquor dollars really do seem inevitable, even in the Bible Belt.  I’m looking forward to hearing the spin Greg Sankey puts out on the day the conference officially renounces its current rule.  I wonder how long it will take Georgia to change its policy after that occurs.

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Still sleeping

Jim Delany, in case you need further confirmation, is FOS.

Delany: ACC expansion made B10 feel "cramped." "More risk in staying where we were." Maryland, Rutgers "sleeping giants."

— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) July 29, 2017

Giants, my ass.  The only big thing he saw was broadcast markets.  If Rutgers were located in New Hampshire, I doubt Delany would have given it a first thought, let alone a second.

The difference between a “mix” and a spot

We finally learn there’s a bridge too far even for Bill Hancock’s shilling.

The playoff director is at Mountain West media days and during his open media session he discussed the playoff, and that includes him saying that “absolutely” a team from the Group of Five has a chance to make the playoff.

Hancock also went on to say that an unbeaten Mountain West champion would be in the mix for a spot in playoff. The key word there is “mix,” because it will take a special season for any team from a non-power conference to have a chance to make the playoff, and that special season would have to be accompanied by a bit of chaos at the top.

Bless his heart.  I doubt even the Mountain West commissioner bought that.

The SEC, where academics just mean more

In fact, so much more that the conference keeps changing the standards for the graduate transfer rule.

The biggest topic of the week was the league’s stringent graduate transfer rule that prevents schools that have previously taken graduate transfers who did not meet eligibility expectations at the end of each term from accepting more graduate transfers for a period of three years.

Legislation approved Friday by the presidents and chancellor reduced that period to a year, which clears the way for Notre Dame quarterback Malik Zaire to immediately join Florida’s team as a graduate transfer.

“We (the SEC) are the unique as it relates to having requirements around our graduate transfers,” Sankey said. “It’s been a maturation process. We started at five years, then to three years and now to one year.”

You can almost sense his chest swelled with pride as he delivered that.

Meanwhile, the league’s coaches are extraordinarily concerned about the academics of their member institutions.

The presidents and chancellors took no action on changing the rule that requires a waiver from the commissioner on intraconference transfers. The league’s football and basketball coaches wanted a rule to disallow such transfers with no waiver available.

Obviously, the lesson to be taken from the Maurice Smith situation is that a player transfer from one SEC program to another is disastrous for the player.  I mean, there couldn’t be any other motivation for the coaches’ stand, could there?

Gibberish in defense of control

According to Todd Berry, the director of the American Football Coaches Association, while coaches are just wild about the new rule allowing redshirt players to appear in as many as four games in a season without sacrificing their statue, they’re not thrilled with the idea of simply granting student-athletes five years of eligibility.  Why?  Um, well…

“Our coaches have always voted down 5-for-5. Some support it, but the majority want to protect the collegiate model, that it takes four years to graduate,” AFCA executive director Todd Berry said on SiriusXM College Sports Nation.

So Berry sees this new idea as somewhere in between.

“This would allow for young people to preserve that redshirt and work on a master’s,” he said. “Football is a different sport. We don’t have 40 games in a season like baseball or basketball. One year is a precious amount of time to play a great sport and get out what you want. I don’t know that there’s a lot of reasons not to do it. Certainly, the only one I’ve heard is that some other sports might like to do it also. If that’s the case, I think football’s a different sport, and everything can’t be regulated the same.”

I see.  That certainly makes more sense than this.

Earlier this month, the AFCA announced it was proposing to allow players to play in any four games and keep their redshirt — as opposed to fewer games, early in the season, just to be eligible for a “medical” redshirt. Every coach is for the proposal, and why wouldn’t they be? It lets them play more players.

But it still needs to go through the NCAA legislative process. One proposal that has failed in the process before is the idea of “5 for 5,” meaning five years of eligibility, no redshirts. But it’s never made it through, in part because of costs and affects on roster turnover.

Jesus, what a bunch of cheap bastards.

Neither fish nor fowl

Man, I love this smack.

… Lupoi then linked up with Saban at Alabama and started out as what Saban called a “recruiting intern.” It wasn’t long before he started paying off, bringing in the top recruiting class of 2016. Sarkisian was the top storyline of Alabama’s postseason meeting with Washington, yet it was Lupoi who was responsible for segments of the rosters of both College Football Playoff semifinalists last year. He also oversaw the recruitment of 2017’s No. 1 overall prospect Najee Harris and had a hand in bringing many of that top-ranked class’s best players. Cal reportedly almost hired him back as defensive coordinator this offseason, but he ultimately turned them down. They probably couldn’t have paid him $950,000.

Lupoi is certainly one of the best in the nation at his job, but his hefty raise also crystallizes a lot of what makes the NCAA scam so gross. Legislators arguing that paying athletes will cost them money, rich university presidents defending the sanctity of the “student athlete” model, and athletic directors flailing desperately to cling to their cushy gigs in the multi-billion dollar NCAA pyramid scheme are all perfectly illustrative examples of the sham of amateurism, but nothing feels as direct as a linebackers coach raking in nearly $1 million to convince high school athletes to come work for free at Alabama.

Now, before you get all riled up and say “amateurism sux”, you might want to hear Bob Bowlsby’s latest spin on college athletics’ employment structure.  It’s a real beaut.

One of major-college sports’ leading voices on Monday provided a different answer to the hotly debated question of the connection between college athletes and amateurism.

Big 12 Conference Commissioner Bob Bowlsby told the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics: “I don’t think they’re amateurs. They’re college athletes.”

…

Bowlsby declined to get into a detailed discussion of how he defines pros and amateurs.

“I’m not going to get into that,” he said. “You could write a book on that. But the professionals are being paid and amateurs are doing it for the love of the game. And both of those are different than the college athletic environment. …

“We typically categorize athletes as professionals or amateurs, right? And I don’t think (college athletes) are either. I think it’s a complete(ly) different genre of its own. Doesn’t exist anyplace else in the world where higher education and sports participation are linked, are co-curricular — and that makes it different.”

The NCAA’s next promotional campaign writes itself, doesn’t it?  “College athletics, brought to you by the NCAA — it’s just different.”

Even these guys know there’s too much money swirling around now to justify the romanticism of amateurism anymore.

Playing for the love of the game, not for a paycheck…

Gawd, I love these guys’ bullshit.  (h/t)

“I think if we move toward true pay for play, if we give students money over and above that which reimburses them for their costs, then you kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs,” says IU Athletics Director Fred Glass. “You take away the special sauce out of sports … I think you lose the magic of sports.”

In the end, Luck says he doesn’t foresee the NCAA moving away from their core values.

“Because those values, in my mind, are somewhat timeless, I think they’ll be around a long, long time,” he says. “I think if you take a [look] back at college athletics over the last 145 or 146 years, I think most folks would say it’s been a force for good in this country.”

If the special sauce is so tasty, why don’t they ever suggest serving it with their coaches and administrators, too?  Don’t those folks love the game as much as the players do?

*************************************************************************

UPDATE:  Here’s another perspective on that love.

“While I was at Clemson, I was one of those guys who thought totally different from the other guys around me. I wasn’t your typical athlete. I found myself more aware of other things that were going on behind the scenes. I could see how they [the NCAA] would cover things up, while also telling us that we’re privileged and we’re blessed because we have a scholarship. Even though it’s true that I was blessed, I viewed playing football as an investment. When you have schools that are spending $20,000 and more each year to get players on campus, but are bringing in $17,000,000 in a bowl game, it starts to devalue the scholarship.”