To kick off SEC Media Days this afternoon without the help of a former chicken inseminaor to entertain the crowds, SEC Commissioner Mike Slive proposed a “National Agenda for Change.”
Additionally, and perhaps more importantly when it comes to the football side of the equation, Slive proposed doing away with the renewable one-year scholarships and instead offering student-athletes binding multi-year scholarships. If this slice of Slive’s proposal were to be adopted nationally, it would in theory make it much more difficult for coaches, particularly in Slive’s own conference, to perform their annual roster manipulation.
Most casual fans probably don’t realize that a scholarship offer from a school to a student to play football is only good for 1 year. And relatively few fans, even relatively hard-core fans, realize that quite a few coaches (we’re staring you down, SEC), aren’t shy about not renewing the scholarships of “under-performing” players.
“See, Coach Saban, rather than getting into a messy situation with that under-performing player, we just… fixed the glitch.”
Notre Dame may not explicitly, by policy, shun the practice of cutting players via non-renewal of scholarships, but the Irish traditionally (and as far as I’m aware, without fail), honor a player’s scholarship for their full academic career. Only in unique circumstances – and usually for disciplinary reasons – does ND ever fail to renew a scholarship for a student-athlete.
It’s time to market this point. While Slive’s four-pronged “agenda” is swell on the surface, I can’t help but view this move as a gambit to put the ball in the NCAA’s court and take the heat off of the SEC (if you’ve been living under a rock, they’ve been getting a lot of bad press lately). The NCAA is likely to entirely fail to make any of the improvements recommended in the “agenda” in any sort of timely manner, and almost certainly before the public forgets about this little media splash. Even the SEC’s own coaches are already publicly proclaiming the plan to be a “terrible idea.” But for the time being – and likely through the 2011 season – this proposal is going to garner a lot of attention, and Notre Dame should take advantage of the moment, standing as the model to which the SEC publicly aspires.
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It should be noted that contrary to what some people say, this is not going to hit Saban so much as guys like Miles and Nutt. While Saban isn’t shy about pushing guys aside, many of them seem to develop sudden career-ending “injuries” (like a severe case of not-good-enough-itis) which keeps them on scholarship, albeit off the team. It’s sketchy from a competition ethics point of view but actually does amount to doing right by such players.
Nice work new guy. We may consider having you post again sometime…
I am completely in favor of such a move. If the SEC had to actually keep their kids around and didn’t just cut players who don’t pan out after a year (call it what you want, it is cutting), I think they would face a much more level playing field with the rest of the country.
However, it won’t matter. The SEC will find a way around it. In all honesty, I would expect that if they do this, suddenly you’ll see a lot more kids getting booted from SEC schools due to A) grades (which is hard to do, when they regularly have kids around for 4 years who go pro and then can barely form a frickin’ sentence on Draft Day), or B) undisclosed violations of team rules.
The grades thing wouldn’t be hard for them to do. They’d just put the worst tutors with kids who aren’t panning out athletically. And undisclosed violations? Could be anything. They’d just need to enact some kind of honor code thing, and then anytime a 20 year old who hasn’t panned out athletically gets caught drinking a single beer, kick him out.
Sadly, it probably would work that way.
Grades would actually be pretty easy to use as a method of “cutting” underperforming players from the team. They’d just start actually enforcing any sort of academic progress measure for the players they want to get rid of, and it’ll happen automatically. No fancy tutor switching required. Goodness knows none of their players are graduating, so they’ll just be “not graduating” a few years earlier if they don’t play well on the field.
good angle on the whole “punt to the NCAA” approach. i think the NCAA, with the COI and it’s perceived inconsistency, inefficiency and ineffectiveness is casting a long shadow on what is already a heavily-criticized NCAA. this is akin to state govts picking and choosing when to punt issues to the federal level, where they can die.
I am reminded of a time when Lou Holtz was coach @ ND. A young man (from Colorado?) who was the son of a former ND football player and who was assumed to be on the verge of accepting an offer from ND instead took an offer from FSU. Coach Holtz is reputed to have said “he didn’t make a 4 year mistake, he made a 40 year mistake.”
Anyone remember that? I think the young man was a kicker.
Ture story – the kid’s name was Scott Bentley, son of Bob Bentley ’67
You have to love Steve Spurrier’s logic on the proposal. On the one hand he doesn’t want to “make it more difficult,” for his recruits from “difficult backgrounds” to play ball by raising their cumulative GPA from a 2.0 to a 2.5. On the other, it’s a “terrible idea” to not have the ability to take away the scholarship that allows them the ability to attend the University if they don’t perform on the football field.
I think Spurrier, on his own, has demonstrated just how bankrupt many of these programs are, using these kids for their own selfish purposes.
The Commissioner of the SEC was right to suggest this change, and this article is absolutely right to call on ND to support it. It’s time we stopped coaches like Steve Spurrier from ruining these kids lives for his own aggrandizement.
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HUH?
It’s spam.
I had no idea this was going on…pretty crappy practice IMO