For the sake of other guests at the beachside resort where the SEC spring meetings are taking place, it’s a good thing nobody has yet invented a BS detector that could be placed in the lobby. Imagine paying $700 a night just to hear a siren go off every time a coach or administrator steps in front of a microphone.
As usual at this event, reality is measured in inverse proportion to the amount of bellyaching over the state of affairs in college sports. The more someone like Georgia president Jere Morehead refers to the current playing field as “anarchy,” the more confident you can be that their proposed fix is entirely self-serving.
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While they may think the rhetoric coming out of Miramar Beach sounds good in their cloistered meeting rooms or in front of the overpaid consultants who leech off their overinflated budgets, much of the country hears the SEC’s hysteria as bitterness that the rules of the game now longer allow them to stack the deck.
“I’ve been a huge advocate that if we can’t find rules that everybody plays by, then we should play by our own,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters. “I’m not afraid of that. I’m not afraid to break away and say that our conference is strong enough to go out and play. If we could actually function financially, it would make our programs more stable. We could support things financially. I’m talking about all the sports and do our own rules — I’d be all for that.”
Did anyone just hear an siren go off? Is there a fire somewhere? Should we be heading for the nearest exit?
Oh, that was just an SEC coach trying to sell the ridiculous with a straight face. Sorry to alarm you.
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Despite Smart’s commitment to this bit, it shouldn’t take a genius to see what’s really going on here: Since the implementation of name, image and likeness turned the economic model of college sports on its head, the SEC is no longer the competitive behemoth that it once was.
You can talk all you want about fan passion and gameday pageantry and even under-the-table cheating, but the SEC’s biggest advantage over the last 20 years was owning the real estate where the highest concentration of great athletes (and particularly football players) came from.
When someone like Smart or Nick Saban could sit in a living room in Atlanta or Miami and talk about how many millions of dollars their former players were making in the NFL, there was no need to look beyond the SEC.
While the SEC’s brass cries and complains because they no longer own college sports, they’re missing a larger point about a potential breakaway.
(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Now, college athletics is more like any other American business where most people decide where to live based on money and opportunity, not staying close to home. The SEC has great stadiums, fan bases and tradition, but SEC supremacy was largely an illusion based on favorable geography, the perception of being an NFL factory and probably a few dollars exchanging hands under the table.
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That’s gone now, and as it has become increasingly clear that the college sports model is never going back to the way it was, we are now hearing threats of the SEC going it alone because they’re the ones who really care about being governed by rules.
“There’s been circumvention of the rules the entire time,” Smart said. “There’s always somebody trying to. It’s the policing of that and the navigating to make people follow within the guidelines and what’s happened with litigation is, there are no guidelines. I’ll just go to court, just go to court on everything. Not just player eligibility but on everything, it’s a lawsuit away from everybody backing down so they strip the power of any regulatory agency we’d put in place. At some point you have to say, ‘How do you want to do this?’”
Smart is absolutely correct in identifying the problem, but only someone who has lived their entire life in the SEC bubble could believe their conference has the credibility to take that stand. They most certainly do not.
Many of us are old enough to remember when Tennessee was magically finding NCAA violations to avoid having to pay Jeremy Pruitt, when Ole Miss was trying to dump a treasure trove of Hugh Freeze recruiting violations on Houston Nutt in order to save their recruiting class, when Auburn had to suspend Cam Newton over payola allegations and then work hard to restore his eligibility so he could win them a national title.
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If the primary issue is that schools won’t follow the rules because all they care about is winning, the SEC’s hands are stained by decades of dirt. The only thing that’s changed is that in a world without rule, the Big Ten has ascended and the SEC has declined.
Now, in response, the SEC thinks the answer might be to go do their own thing under the guise of creating a more level playing field, as if that’s something they’ve ever cared about when they had the structural advantage of not having to pay their athletes. Sometimes you wonder if they even hear themselves talk.
But I’ll make this very clear and simple: If the SEC breaks away from the NCAA, it will be the end of the SEC.
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Yes, it’ll still have a good TV deal and will still be able to fill stadiums and it’ll have plenty of media propagandists ready to parrot the contention that the SEC champion is the national champion.
But are we really supposed to believe that Texas and LSU are going to allow themselves to be constrained by schools like Mississippi State and South Carolina that don’t have as big of a budget and will want more stringent rules over spending? Do we really think that the SEC’s elite programs are going to agree to a salary cap when the Big Ten doesn’t have one or even an ounce less flexibility to do the things they think are necessary to win? And is it realistic in any way to think that the SEC is going to be able to stop a politically savvy attorney general from taking it to court when it has to sanction a member school for violating rules?
Not only is it a fantasy SEC utopia that doesn’t and will never exist, it will lead quickly to the breakup of the conference and the formation of a national super league. Though it has long been a concept for the top 30 or 40 football programs to pool their media rights and leave everyone else behind, there is no clear pathway to how it would happen.
The SEC operating as an independent rule-enforcing entity, and the wedge it would drive between the haves and have-nots in its own league, is the match, the matchbox and the gasoline required to burn it all down.
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That’s probably not what Smart and Morehead have in mind. But in college sports, those who practice situational ethics and ignore practicality will be led to a place where the cure is worse than the disease. In a world where it’s become extremely easy for people to believe their own BS, maybe an alarm wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
