“That’s going to be a fun luncheon tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow” being today’s annual SEC coaches’ meeting at the league headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama.  “Fun” being Missouri’s Barry Odom showing up to feed some of his peers shit sandwiches, evidently.

Barry Odom will have some choice words for his fellow SEC coaches on Wednesday. Missouri’s head football coach is just now realizing the full impact of probation recently handed down by the NCAA that included a bowl ban in 2019.

Odom said Tuesday that his 19 seniors are being “contacted and bombarded non-stop” by teams taking advantage of NCAA bylaws that allow rising seniors from programs hit with postseason bans to transfer without penalty…

No Missouri players have transferred due to the ruling, but Odom and Missouri remain frustrated.

“I’m also now recruiting our senior class again,” Odom said.

The coach said that he has “made a number of calls” to conference peers pursuing his players. This comes in advance of Wednesday’s annual SEC coaches’ meeting at the league headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama.

“I haven’t gotten return phone calls,” Odom said.

“I know there is a handful of guys who are talking daily to my players,” he added.

And the number one offender?

Odom singled out Tennessee as the most frequent caller for his players among SEC programs during a booster event on Tuesday.

“Everybody is going to have a bad day,” Odom said, expressing his frustration with keeping his players from transferring. “You combine that with somebody that — who’d we beat 51-17 this year? Tennessee? Yeah, those guys. They are non-stop reaching out daily [saying], ‘Hey, come here.’ The grass is not always greener somewhere else.”

Sounds like something straight out of the Phil Fulmer playbook, don’t it?  Man, you gotta love “it just means more”.

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The SEC is a Jimmies and Joes conference.

This chart comes from Athlon.

The chart below highlights the average recruiting ranking for all SEC programs across the last five years (2015-19), according to the 247Sports Composite Team Rankings, in addition to the won-loss record for each team (both overall and in conference) during the last five years (2014-18).

That’s a pretty solid correlation between wins and recruiting rankings there… except for Tennessee and Mississippi State.

2019 SEC spring game schedule

We get football in less than two months.

It's always football season in the SEC. https://t.co/2zhAOFTGZz pic.twitter.com/gy8Ks5AgOD

— SEC Network (@SECNetwork) February 11, 2019

The best is saved for last, of course.  All by itself.

The SEC’s insane Signing Day

How crazy was it?  This crazy.

With February’s National Signing Day now pretty well in the books, what seemed obvious after December’s Early Signing Period is now final. The SEC just had the best recruiting year for a conference in the history of recruiting rankings.

The SEC did something that’s never happened in the internet rankings era: finish with teams in four of the top five spots on the 247Sports Composite class rankings.

It wasn’t just at the top, either.  Almost every team in the conference killed it on the recruiting trail.

Arkansas, which just won two freaking games, somehow has a top-25 class. So does Ole Miss, transitioning out of NCAA sanctions with a strong finish. South Carolina’s ahead of both of them, just inside the top 20 at No. 19.

Thirteen of 14 teams finished in the top 36. The last of those is Mizzou, which just got hit with an NCAA bowl ban. Every team in the conference except Vanderbilt (at No. 56 nationally) is at least pulling its weight.

I don’t mean to ignore the middle.  Things went well there, too.

Titles are reserved for programs that sign more blue-chip recruits than non-, and only 13 teams in the whole country met that threshold in 2018, including all four Playoff teams.

The SEC has seven teams above that cut right now for 2019, including three — A&M, Florida, and Tennessee — whose 2018 rosters left them just below the Blue-Chip Ratio line. The Vols got there by signing a five-star tackle, Darnell Wright, and four-star linebacker, Henry To’oto’o, in the last hour or so of the February NSD.

Like I said, nuts.

Tiger season

It’s the SEC, so color me shocked, shocked by this news.

Coaches from at least four Southeastern Conference football teams have contacted some Missouri seniors about their interest in transferring in the wake of NCAA sanctions against the Tigers’ football program, an MU spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.

Auburn, Mississippi State, Tennessee and Texas A&M have inquired about Mizzou seniors who could be eligible for NCAA waivers to play at another school immediately without having to sit out a year.

Nice, he said sarcastically.

All of which makes this gesture stick out like a sore thumb.

Sundvold added that Georgia’s Kirby Smart was among the SEC coaches who have called Odom to say his team wouldn’t poach players from MU’s roster.

Today, in Jimmys and Joes

From Bruce Feldman’s look back at Meat Market ($$):

“The approach (Orgeron) took would eventually have led to success,” former Ole Miss linebackers coach Dave Corrao says. “He had the willingness to go into places and out-recruit people because at Ole Miss you’re not a name-brand program. You’re trying to break through.

“No disrespect to (former Ole Miss head coach David) Cutcliffe, but there were probably only five draft-quality players in the whole program when we got there. And keeping up with the Joneses in the SEC is a hard thing, man.”

Which is why Coach O is getting a contract extension at LSU and Cutcliffe is a lifer at Duke.

Delany’s is bigger.

Hmm… this aggression shall not stand, man.

While the Southeastern Conference remains a preeminent force in football, its three-year domination of college sports revenue is ending.

However, it will take years to erase the financial cushion it has built.

The SEC had just under $660 million in revenue during its 2018 fiscal year, according to a federal tax return that the conference provided Friday.

That resulted in an average of $43.7 million being distributed to the 13 member schools that received full shares. Mississippi did not get a full share because of its football team was banned from postseason play.

The Big Ten Conference likely distributed a little more than $50 million to each of its 12 schools that got full revenue shares in fiscal 2018, according to schools’ recent financial disclosures.

Sounds like it’s time to revisit those deals with the SEC’s broadcast partners.  We all remember what Mike Slive did the last time the conference presidents lost their bragging rights.