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Daily Huddle 4-27-12

A collection of college football photos, stories and links from around the web.

Hey Georgia, it's proceed

Probably a kettle/pot thing here with they way I spell, but hey it’s all in good fun.

The Knight commission would like Bowl payouts to be linked to graduation rate. Good luck with that, and that’s from someone who would love it.

John Walters (@jdubs88) picked up on a great quote from PAC12 commissioner Larry Scott and gives us this story.

Michigan safety Josh Furman was found not guilty of assault and battery and domestic violence charges. (via @chengelis)

@BTNDienhart reports that Iowa Board of Regents has approved plans for the second and final phase of the football facilities plan.

The NCAA has pushed back the date on a new, more stringent, academic standards so they would not go into effect until 2016. I’m sure they will get changed four more times before then anyways so I don’t see the point, but whatever keeps people employed.

Andy Staples is celebrating the new college football playoff. I imagine with some burnt ends and sweet tea.

Remember that Colorado State trio of players who beat the snot out of some other folks, well they have been formally charged with some fairly minor stuff.

South Carolina got off easy from the NCAA from these allegations by basically having the NCAA accept their self-imposed penalties and just adding a few more scholarship reductions.

Sean Adams (@thatsean) wrote this great column for ESPN on the Texas/Texas A&M rivalry ending.

[photo via @ParadigmShift35]

Daily Huddle 4-11-12

South Alabama assistant head coach Kurt Crain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound

Saddest news of the day is that South Alabama assistant head coach Kurt Crain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

According to TideSports.com, Alabama spent $3.915 million to play in the BCS title game, yet only received revenues of $1.95 million. This means they lost nearly $2 million on one game just to win the National title.

The NCAA has been regulating bowl game sponsors, including denying 5-hour energy the chance to sponsor the International Bowl, leading to its demise.

Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell liked to text. A lot. Hundreds of times in a day, including the day of, or the day before SEC conference games. More details here.

Speaking of phone records, Butch Davis wants the courts to rule his personal cell phone records closed to avoid their release to “unscrupulous individuals.”

Six Things I Would Change about the NCAA

SEC commissioner Mike Slive

I started this article about two hours before Mike Slive took the podium on Wednesday in Birmingham. Of course one of my points was also major factor in the speech by Slive and I actually trashed the article. Then, I was bored last night, pulled it out of the recycling bin and re-worked it to this:

Six things I would change about the NCAA.

 

1) Find a way to get subpoena power

I’m not a lawyer, nor would I ever want to be one, but if you can’t go after a good majority of the people you are trying to interview, exactly what is their incentive to turn on the team that they love? Imagine if the police couldn’t punish any criminal that didn’t confess?

According to this NCAA article on the Investigative process, the only people that the NCAA can punish and force to provide information such as phone and bank records are those within its jurisdiction.

Those records and interviews can be obtained from institutions, student-athletes, prospective student-athletes and those employed by institutions because of the NCAA’s cooperative principle. However, the NCAA does not have subpoena power and cannot compel those outside of its jurisdiction (parents of student-athletes or prospects, agents, high school personnel) to cooperate in the investigative process. The NCAA cannot require individuals to turn over documents through discovery.

Simply put, make a deal with the devil (government) or whoever it takes and get subpoena power. This is the only way that investigations can be done properly.

 

2) Re-write the bylaws into something about ¼ the size

Every bylaw seems to have 20 exceptions that are all reactions to someone who previously skirted the rule. Currently it takes so much effort to understand all of the bylaws it’s ridiculous.

For example, if you just try to remember all of the phone call rules (bylaw 13.1) you quickly learn that it is an insane 18 pages long! In fact, the entire manual is 444 pages and available in pdf form here, a size that makes in impossible to memorize it all.

 

3) Make and control a National Recruiting Database

That’s right, get into the 21st century and create an online national resource for all prospective student athletes to make themselves available to schools. My recruiting database would be setup much like a social networking site. Students would submit their clearinghouse paperwork, transcripts, highlight tapes, etc. 

Recruits would, and this is the big one, be able to control who could contact them and how. The prospective student athlete would be able to tell people how coaches may contact them, how often coaches can contact them, what hours they want to be contacted and by whom. It would instantly make the 18 pages of bylaw 13.1 unnecessary along with many other pages of the NCAA rulebook. It would put the power of contact into the hands of the recruit and free up a lot of the coaches time because they wouldn’t be unknowingly chasing uninterested recruits.

The additional bonus is it would eliminate the need for people like Willie Lyles, the crazy payments and the entire scandal that multiple schools are going through right now.

 

4) Don’t just vacate wins, heavily fine the schools

Unlike most people, I have no issue with the vacating of wins. If you cheated, then you don’t deserve to be recognized as a champion, winner of a game or a record holder. However, you have to hit programs on what they all are really after, money. A championship can be bring in millions of extra money in sales of merchandise, sales of tickets, booster donations and application fees by prospective students. This is why the NCAA needs to make fines that scare most departments away from cheating. Cripple the athletic departments through fines, then give the fine money to charities and member schools.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair to fine a poor athletic department the same amount as a well-to-do one, so the fines have to be percentages of average revenue over the past three years. So, if a department has overall three year average revenue of $10 million, then a 1% fine would be  $100,000, where if the average revenue was $100 million, then the fine would be $1 million.

If you don’t believe me on this, try this article by Dave Pickle, a blogger on NCAA.org or one of the many articles he links to.

 

5) Make scholarships offers binding and multi-year

That’s right, if you are going to provide a recruit with a scholarship offer, only make it possible to repeal the offer under certain conditions, such as failure to gain acceptance to the school or criminal activity. Otherwise, the offer needs to be binding and the school must honor the scholarship.

No grey-shirting, no blue-shirting or whatever other kind of shirt, the offer must be honored when the student would enroll in the fall (or previous spring if they are an early enrollee). Stop playing games with athletes on over-signing, pulling offers because they got hurt, etc. I would also increase maximum scholarships to 90 in football to cover the few “busts” that might occur, and most other sports by 1-2 scholarships each.

Then, all initial scholarships would be for three years, renewable once for an additional two years. The renewal would be automatic provided that the athlete meets certain academic requirments and is still on the team. The NCAA would have set rules and would handle all appeals as to when an athlete felt that their scholarship was taken away unjustly.

 

6) Set penalties in writing

Instead of what appear as (are) abitrary penalties, given on a case-by-case basis with no consistency, make the penalties more consistent. Just like when someone convicted of a crime in the criminal court, there needs to be some sort of sentencing guideline.

For instance, make the penalty for using an ineligile player the vacating of all wins, championships and personal records, a .5% fine to the school and loss of 1 scholarship per every 25% of the season a player participated in. That’s in, no interpretation, no waiting for a COI ruling, just a simple set-in-stone rule. Imagine how simple that would be.

 

Final thoughts:

 Most of my ideas here would probably hit 500 road-blocks, just like the experts expect to have to the ideas presented by Slive, and be changed so much on the way to becoming new NCAA bylaws that my new NCAA would become just like the current NCAA; outdated and inefficient. If that doesn’t show the the current model is broken then I don’t know what does.

North Carolina NCAA Notice of Allegations

I was going to write up one of my huge, 2,500 word articles on the UNC NOA complete with cliff notes style breakdown as I did with the Jim Tressel situation. Then Michael Felder (@InTheBleachers), beat me to it with this article. So, why wouldn’t I just carry on a write my own article like everyone else does? Well, a couple of reasons; one Felder played football at UNC and was even teammates with one of the accused “enablers” Chris Hawkins and two, I have spent the past three nights at the car dealership picking out a new car which has severely hampered my blogging time the past few days.

UNC could be in a world of trouble after their NOA letter

So, after reading through all 42 pages of the NOA twice, you will find a few things. One, whoever redacted the names at UNC didn’t do a very good job of being consistent. Two, UNC could be in a whole lot of trouble. Three, I hope my favorite school never gets one of these letters.

Thought number one is actually supported by this articlehere from J.P. Giglio. The omission and other mistakes are not that big of a deal, but it does make you scratch your head and wonder why a person’s name is redacted in one area but left for you to view in another.

Thought number two basically comes down to this. UNC was generally considered to be a clean program in the college football world. Then they brought in a coach who had a less-than-pristine reputation from his time at Miami. Along with Butch Davis came John Blake and Blake’s agent connections and his shady dealings. That led to the current situation, which seems to show rampant cheating by Blake and a few others. Sure, Blake wasn’t the only one, but he was the main cog and initial violator.

Thought number three is related to this article from the Wall Street Journal, laying out the last of the “clean” programs. 17 in all, with just four from the “Big Six” conferences.

To wrap up, if you took the time to read the article from Felder and maybe even the NOA, then I think you can see where UNC has a large number of violations that they need to explain to the NCAA. When it is all done, I think by using the rouge defense, Butch Davis will be able to keep his job, but it is going to cost the school all of the wins from 2008, 2009 and 2010, a one year bowl ban and probably 5 scholarships each year for three straight years.

Previewing the ESPN Joe Paterno Coach Krzyzewski Difference Makers Special

Front and back of the program card from the ESPN Different Makers special

 

On June 30th, ESPN will be airing a Special called Difference Makers: Life Lessons with Joe Paterno and Mike Krzyzewski. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to the taping of the event this morning, then got real lucky to find an employee who would take my shift just a few minutes before the event was scheduled to start. I was able to get to Eisenhower Auditorium with one minute to spare by sprinting my “big boned” frame across the Penn State campus in the 86 degree heat in my work clothes. Thankfully I had time to cool off and catch my breath since ESPN started the event almost 30 minutes late.

My seats for the first few segments they taped were in the next to last row, right by the ESPN production team. I’ve never been in a production truck, so maybe they are all like it was today, but all I can is they had more than a few miscommunications that resulted in some yelling matches and one re-taping of the Rece Davis intro. The other thing that took a segment or two to get used to was the fact they things were taped out of order of how they will be shown during the TV version.

The first four segments they taped were with Joe Paterno and Mike Krzyzewski. While the segments will be split up in a different order for the show, they were done consecutively with approximately five minute breaks inbetween. The breaks would have been shorter, but we had to wait for everyone to get back to their seats. Thankfully I have been blessed with a normally working bladder, which resulted in a nice seat upgrade for the last two taped segments.

The intro was short, with Rece noting how today was actually the first time that Paterno and Krzyzewski had ever met, and that their programs show “everything that is right” in collegiate athletics.

Each segment with the coaches began with Davis asking each coach a few questions about the segment topic, followed by a question or two from either an audience member or a Duke University member via video conference. The topics of the four segments taped by the coaches in order were teaching, family, leadership and excellence.

Before I get into some of the statements from the coaches, I’m sure the Penn State readers want to know what Paterno was like, as quite frankly there is a reason why Paterno has cut down on his public appearances. Paterno was in an excellent mood, cracking jokes the entire show and was as lively as I have seen in about 18 months. The only time Davis had to repeat anything to Paterno was during the audience question segments and Davis really only cut Paterno off from one of his typical, long, off-tangent stories once. To be honest, I’m sure when the show airs that those who don’t follow Paterno and know his ways are going to have twitter buzzing on the 30th with comments about Paterno’s age and senility, but all I can say is the comments will be off base and uninformed, except when people point out that Paterno says Penn State went 9-7 last season. 

Picture of Joe Paterno and Mike Krzyzewski taping ESPN special (via Jay Paterno)

As for quotes from the coaches, since I was not on a credential, I don’t know how much I can get away with while avoiding a cease-and-desist order from ESPN so I’ll just add in a few quick quotes that stuck out to me, slightly paraphrased to try and avoid a need to hire a lawyer.

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During the segment on teaching, Krzyzewski said that you have to change how you teach, but never change the values that you teach.

During the family segment, Paterno said that to make players feel at home in the Penn State football family, the tries to see what people lacked in their upbringing, then add his 2-cents to fill the void.

Coach Krzyzewski talked about how his entire family is involved with the basketball program, so it is a family job, not just his job thrown on the entire family. He said that while his daughters were growing up, he never had basketball pictures or trophies in the house, only family photos. Krzyzewski also added that his daughters have never told him that he loved basketball more than them, which is important to him.

During the leadership segment, Paterno said that good leaders how to show interest in the people they are leading. He also added that leaders have to be open-minded, flexible and understand the other people in the room. Krzyzewski added that good leaders have to find their own way of leading, and that they have to be able to answer two key questions; who are you leading and why are you leading.

An audience member asked a question to both coaches asking about their greatest moment of adversity, to which Krzyzewski answered “any practice with Coach Knight.”

When asked a question about NCAA compliance, Paterno admitted to breaking a secondary rule the other day by watching a few minutes of off-season summer workouts. Krzyzewski said that if he could change anything about the NCAA, it would be to make them modern. He went on to say that there are too many people in compliance and that it is an indictment on the system.

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A quick shot after the second player segment while sitting with the Paterno family

At this point, the segments with the coaches were done being taped and the production staff wanted to fill some of the front seats that were vacated by Paterno family members, so five of us from the back were moved to the front for the taping of the two segments with former players. People have always said that the Paterno family is large, but I never realized exactly how big until I seated in the middle of them all, I think in the seat that belonged to Jay Paterno’s wife Kelley.

The two segments with former players were short, with each player taking just one question during each segment. I really liked the answers offered by former Duke player Jay Williams, although I didn’t take notes during these two segments since I was in an area where the cameras could catch me. Michael Robinson managed to get a plug in for his new webshow and Matt Millen and Jay Bilas were in their typical talking-head modes.

Overall I enjoyed the experience despite the drawn out breaks and extra stuff that had to be done to put out a better TV version. I really enjoyed listening to the coaches and only wished that each segment could have been longer.