More fuel for the fire

Hey, the 10-second substitution proposal has already exposed one fault line among football coaches, so what’s another NCAA rule that might stir some bad blood?

If the NCAA moves forward with an early signing period in college football, it will be staunchly opposed by Stanford coach David Shaw.

“I might be alone in this, I think it’s terrible,” Shaw said following the Cardinal’s spring practice Saturday. “I think it’s terrible. The reason [for an early signing period], in my opinion, is coaches don’t like when kids commit and switch late.”

… ”On top of that — and I’ll be honest here, which is rare for a football coach in a setting like this — but we have a lot of kids that don’t know if they’re going to get into school until after that early signing day,” Shaw said. “So we’re going to punish the academic schools just because coaches don’t want a kid to switch their commitment?

“People can make whatever argument they want, it boils down to that. … Coaches don’t want to keep recruiting an entire class all year.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think there was a divide and conquer strategy in play here, except I don’t think the NCAA is devious enough to pull something like that off and I have no idea what’s to be gained by it in any event.  Still, I figure we’re one lobbying the Conference Commissioners Association story away from things getting really personal.  Again.

This is what short-sighted gets you.

Jeremy Foley, on the potential outcome of the O’Bannon suit:

“To spend a lot of time on what-ifs is not really my style,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who what they do is defend lawsuits and put together whatever arguments they have to put together. I get it’s a really significant issue, but it’s just a guessing game where it ends. I’m sure there will be appeals.”

The reason I give thought pieces like this credence, is because there aren’t enough folks on the defendant’s side of O’Bannon thinking like Vanderbilt’s AD.

“I’m a lawyer and there are times when you gamble and times you try to reach a settlement,” said Vanderbilt Athletics Director David Williams, who teaches sports law. “I don’t know all of the details that the NCAA lawyers know and certainly they know more than I know. But it seems to me this is one where you try to come to a solution and go on about our business because I do think it is a big gamble. The consequences could be very, very large.”

Instead, most of the population is made up of the don’t care types like Foley and the don’t know types like LSU’s Joe Alleva.

On the other side of the spectrum, LSU Athletics Director Joe Alleva doesn’t think the NCAA should settle.

“I think the NCAA feels like they have a very good case, but who knows when you get in front of a court and judge?” Alleva said. “If star players could start selling their names themselves and making money off it — selling autographs, selling T-shirts — it could change the landscape significantly for those athletes. It would be market-place driven, obviously. I don’t know what the answer is going to be.”

Coincidently, it’ll be the Foleys and Allevas who will be shouting “why didn’t somebody warn us?” the loudest if things go south.

So much for changing the culture

Penn State University Board of Trustees member Alvin Clemens announced his resignation Friday, the Associated Press reported, saying that the Board’s 2011 decision to fire Joe Paterno represented a “rush to injustice.”

At least Mark Emmert got ‘em to pony up a few bucks.

Off to the recruiting races

ESPN is reporting that the NCAA is seriously considering an early signing period for college football.

College football is taking steps toward establishing an early signing period, according to the NCAA official who manages the national letter of intent program.

Susan Peal, NCAA associate director of operations, said the continued acceleration of recruiting has led the Conference Commissioners Association to consider an earlier date to supplement the long-existing date in February, similar to the structure for basketball and other sports.

“I think everyone wants an early signing period,” Peal said this week. “It’s just trying to nail down what’s the appropriate date for that.”

Can’t say I’m surprised, given the way the whole process has noticeably accelerated over the past few years.  I used to be unsure as to whom an early period would favor, but it seems clear to me now with the way the power programs are adding advisory staff to beef up contacts with the high schools that they would be the victors to whom the spoils would flow.  Which is probably why the NCAA is taking this up now.

Draft from the north country

One shortcoming I have as a lifetime Southerner is a total lack of familiarity with the NHL draft.  Fortunately, that’s what we have Michigan bloggers for.  Brian Cook has an interesting response to Mark Cuban’s whining about the one-and-done rule:

There is a solution here. It’s easy, actually: the NBA moves to an NHL-style draft where any relevant player is automatically inserted at 18. This preserves their eligibility. The NBA then allows teams to sign draftees but forces them to guarantee contracts one year longer than their eligibility would last (IE, signing a guy out of HS: five year contract, freshman 4 years, etc) except in the case of graduating seniors, who are owed nothing.

If there’s a five-round draft, say, that

• increases NCAA popularity as NBA fans check out their prospects,
• reduces bad NBA contracts for unready or plain overrated prospects,
• encourages the NBA to sign guys when they’re ready and only then,
• allows LeBron-type prospects to immediately hit the NBA like they deserve to.

That is a vast improvement on the current system and 1000% more fun than anything Mark Cuban’s come up with.

The more I think about it, the more I find this pretty damned clever.  It neatly gets around the absence of a legitimate minor-league alternative to the college game, lets some kids get paid, gives a nod to cost control for the pros and to some extent allows player development to proceed at its own pace.

Assuming the NCAA could live with it, here’s my question:  why wouldn’t that work for the NFL, too?

Johnny makes bank.

No doubt you’re aware that Manziel currently has no affiliation with a football team.  That doesn’t seem to have limited his ability to earn something off his name.

The former Texas A&M quarterback signed an endorsement deal with Nike that spokesman KeJuan Wilkins confirmed to ESPN.com on Thursday night.

Manziel will wear Nike gear and appear in marketing campaigns for the global apparel and shoe manufacturer, Wilkins told the network. No contract details were announced, but ESPN reported that the deal is for multiple years and will be the largest Nike contract for a rookie in the 2014 draft class.

I doubt Nike is planning to restrict promoting him to the College Station market.  So can we take a moment to concede that at least for some players, the NCAA’s amateurism mandate acts as a bar to earning compensation for the use of one’s name or likeness?  And that at least some of that market value is derived from a source other than a school’s name on a jersey?  That hardly seems like rocket science.

The hard part is understanding why that’s fair.

There’s only so much you can do in the name of player safety.

At least they’ve got the sense to end one stupid experiment.

Rule passes: teams won't be penalized 15 yards when officials overturn targeting penalty sources told ESPN—
Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyESPN) March 06, 2014

Now, can we have a mulligan on the Vandy game, please?

Let’s say Troy Calhoun is right…

when he says this about defending the HUNH:

“Based on all assurances, especially when you bring in medical people, they say it’s more of a conditioning matter than it is truly a medical item.”

Then, the question becomes what do you want to do about it?  Do you have the NCAA step in to protect programs that don’t make a maximum effort to condition their players?  Or do you leave it up to the schools to proceed along these lines?

Pruitt is looking for Georgia’s big defensive linemen to slim down also. Georgia lists linemen John Taylor, John Atkins and Chris Mayes at 336, 322 and 321 pounds, respectively.

“We’re trying to get some of our bigger guys down,” Pruitt said. “Personally, we feel like everybody’s heavy. We’d like to be a little faster. That’s just, I guess, out preference. Trying to slim up just a little, including the coaching staff.”

Defensive end Ray Drew said he’s gone from a high of 287 last season to 282 and hopes to get down to 275 by the fall.

Thursday brunch buffet

A little nosh for you…

• Kevin Sumlin says TAMU’s spring football game is worthless for his team.
• Here’s a look at who’s in the mix to start at quarterback in Clemson’s opener against Georgia.
• John Infante suggests that Mark Cuban take on AAU ball instead of the NCAA.
• Greg McGarity, on piped-in music at Sanford Stadium:  “…we have an opportunity to do certain things that will get our crowd excited in a proactive manner, rather than in a reactive manner.”  I have no idea what that means.
• Michael Elkon has an intriguing look at how the unionization effort by the Northwestern players might impact college football transfer rules.
• Nick Saban says he’s powerless to remove an injured player on the field playing a HUNH offense (”So you can’t do anything. You’ve got to call timeout to get a guy out. And if you tell a guy to get down, that’s really against the rules, and they boo him out of the park.”).  Mark Lewis, the NCAA’s executive vice president for championships and alliances, emphasized that an injury timeout already exists.  Good to see everyone’s on the same page.
• With Gary Pinkel’s latest raise, nine SEC head coaches make more than $3 million per year.
• Athlon ranks the 10 best SEC quarterbacks of the BCS era.

The next frontier for mesothelioma lawyers

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As an aside, “NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn could be immediately reached for comment.”  I can’t help but wonder -  what exactly does Stacey do for a living? Because she never seems to speak when reached for comment.