Saturday morning buffet

I’m heading up to Athens shortly for the basketball game, but there’s still time to set out the buffet.

• John Chavis is suing LSU and Texas A&M over his contract buyout.
• Mark Richt ponders life after Mike Bobo.
• Something to keep an eye on? A mom has filed the first-ever lawsuit filed against a youth football league for CTE.
• College athletics, the NCAA and “cheating pays”.
• ESPN ranks the easiest paths to the playoffs.  Georgia checks in at number eight.
• Was Chris Conley a surprise at the NFL Combine?  Tape don’t lie.
• And Andy Staples explains why Conley could turn out to have a better pro career than college career.
• Has the CFP empowered BYU?

Maybe this time there’s a method to the madness.

Initial responses to the NCAA-imposed penalties on LSU for engaging in unacceptable levels of contact with a kid who signed a financial aid agreement with the school but eventually wound up at Alabama have largely been along the same line:  a “confusing rule“, a rule that “has to change“, “the NCAA’s attempt to address the unintended consequences of its prior action are now having additional unintended consequences“.

An accidental mess, in other words, created by everyone’s favorite organization’s ineptitude.

Except what if it isn’t an accident?  As MaconDawg suggests, “Finally, and perhaps most NCAA-y of all, this episode creates a real disincentive for schools to offer FAAs to players.”  Yeah, so?  Methinks it’s quite possible the NCAA perceives that to be a feature, not a bug, of the rule.

We already know the NCAA is, if not outright hostile to, at least unconvinced about the need for players to be able to avoid signing a NLI to play college football.  If you can’t arrange an outright ban of recruits being able to avoid signing the letter, isn’t muddying the waters so much that the schools refuse to offer the possibility in fear of what’s happened to LSU the next best option?

Take a bag home today.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the first marketing campaign based on trolling the NCAA.

Shoot, I’m tempted to go pick up a bag, and I own a gas grill.

The suspend isn’t killing me.

Here’s what an NFL coach had to say about his impression of Todd Gurley at the Combine:

“He is a natural leader. Of course, we’ve all seen him play. But he is better in person than anything I’ve seen or read from afar. That kind of person stands out. Some team is going to rightly give him every chance to get well and be as great as he can be.”

Yeah, that whole autograph thing really seems to have set him back at the next level.

The NFL doesn’t care about players making money – at least if it’s not on the NFL’s own dime.  Manziel was a first-round pick.  If not for the injury, Gurley would be a slam dunk first-rounder, too.  (He may still wind up there, even so.)  The pros just care if you can play.  Which is why the Gurleys and Manziels of the college football world get paid under the table.  Talk about your vicious circle.  Good luck with that, NCAA.

Thursday morning buffet

Perhaps you’ll find something nourishing here.

• SOD taught personal hygiene; Butch has his “Fourth-and-1″.  At Tennessee, they’re always learnin’.
• Vanderbilt is experimenting with GPS in players’ shoulder pads.  (No, it’s not to find them if they get lost on the playing field.)
• Mark Weiszer has a list of the new faces on Georgia’s support staff.
• Todd Gurley’s 2014 season:  In 2014, 61.9 percent of his rushing yards came after contact. He fumbled just three times in 510 carries.
• Don Leebern, friend to the beer drinker.
• “The Gators haven’t had a receiver sniff first- or second-team All-SEC honors from the coaches since Percy Harvin in 2008.”  When people tell you Florida’s offensive personnel don’t live up to the program’s recruiting reputation, this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about.
• Great line from Thomas Brown:  “He still looks good, so he still got it,” Holyfield said. “He says he’s got two more quarters in him.”
• Here’s a look at offensive efficiency trends in the SEC.
• The conclusion to the Silas Nacita affair:  “The bottom line is that I broke the rules.”

Shoot, the messenger

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but chuckle about the hope some of you have that this time the schools are serious about academics in pursuing the pipe dream of reinstating freshman ineligibility for football and basketball players. Why is that funny?  Because it depends upon believing people like Jim Delany.  You know, the guy who once said we’d have a college football playoff over his dead body.  The guy who once said that if the NCAA lost the O’Bannon case, the Big Ten would have no choice but to explore turning to a Division III model.

A guy who’s full of shit when the need arises, in other words.

The thing is, he’s not even bothering to bluff this time.

“We’re sort of on the clock, is the way a lot of us look at it,” Delany said in a recent interview with the Big Ten Network. “We’ve got a lot of litigation challenging intercollegiate athletics, we’ve got congressional interest and we have public skepticism. What we want to do is drive the message that education is first, athletics is second, even though these are the two most popular sports commercially.”  [Emphasis added.]

Got that?  This isn’t about serious academic reform.  It’s about optics with the public and having a sales pitch for the courts and the feds.  That’s all.

Delany as the front man is pretty amusing, too, when you get down to it.

And yet Delany is also more responsible than any other college athletics figure of the past 30 years in commercializing those sports. He annexed Penn State in the early ’90s, touching off the first massive TV-driven realignment wave. He started the influential and money-printing Big Ten Network. He touched off Realignment Mania II five years ago when the league began hunting for a 12^th member that eventually became Nebraska, and then he took it to another degree with his conference’s East Coast push.

You know what would really help Rutgers’ basketball players focus on academics? Not having to travel to Iowa City in the middle of the week for a conference game, as they did last week.

Ah, c’mon.  They could always study on the plane, right?

Living the dream

Those of you who think I ought to quit bitching about the NCAA’s twisted vision of amateurism really should fuck off.

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UPDATE:  A heartwarming farewell from Baylor…

Statement from Baylor AD Ian McCaw on Silas Nacita. pic.twitter.com/e0tmP4kiwh

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) February 25, 2015

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UPDATE #2:  It’s getting weird.

The NCAA did not declare Silas Nacita ineligible and Baylor has not requested a waiver for him.

— Inside the NCAA (@InsidetheNCAA) February 25, 2015

Okay.  Now, will somebody tell us what’s going on here?

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UPDATE #3:  Geez, guys.

"If he's eligible, he'll be back. This is out of our control, it isn't our problem with him." -Briles on Silas Nacita

— Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) February 25, 2015

Maybe Nacita declared himself ineligible.