General

Another Rule Named After An SEC Coach

Jun 1, 2009, 7:15 PM UTC

On Signing Day -- college football’s annual orgy of name-signing andâ†µstar-evaluating -- this year, Houston Nutt announced Ole Miss had signed anâ†µalmost entirely fictional class of 37 players. The NCAA has a hard capâ†µof 25 players per recruiting class, and a huge portion of the Rebels’â†µclass will be playing at junior colleges this fall. Nutt jokedâ†µthat there was “no rule we can’t sign 80.” â†µâ†µAh, but now there is. Nutt’s gone the way of Nick Saban and Laneâ†µKiffin, doing something to embarrassing extreme and getting his own rule: â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥The SEC today passed conference legislation that will cap footballâ†µâ‡¥signing classes at 28 players per year. The NCAA allows 25 players toâ†µâ‡¥enroll annually, but in the last three years more than half of the SECâ†µâ‡¥schools have oversigned. â†µâ†µâ†µHuzzah for that. The SEC will take this legislation and attempt toâ†µmake it a national policy. There’s at least some shot it happens, as theâ†µBig Ten already adheres to an identical policy. â†µ

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â†µThis is a step in the right direction. Oversigning to the degree thatâ†µNutt and others have over the past few years inevitably places theâ†µschools and players in uncertain situations, hoping that the exact rightâ†µnumber of players get in so that they won't have to resort to rosterâ†µhijinks like grayshirting or dubious medical scholarships orâ†µ"suggesting" certain guys transfer. â†µ

â†µâ†µI go back to this uglyâ†µassertion from a Bruce Feldman post in the wake of last year’sâ†µoversignin’ orgy:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥One administrator I spoke with said schools also can make it so someâ†µâ‡¥player doesn’t qualify if they don’t need him to, which may soundâ†µâ‡¥surprising, but it probably shouldn’t at this point.â†µâ†µâ†µThe LOI program’s intent is to provide a measure of sanity to theâ†µrecruiting process: the school is locked into a promise to give a kid aâ†µscholarship and a kid is locked into that school. This sort of thingâ†µchanges the power dynamic. The school can look at its needs once it hasâ†µmore data on its highly speculative class and then send players to JUCO,â†µbasically, when if they remained unsigned they could have found help toâ†µqualify elsewhere and avoided that.â†µ

â†µâ†µThat practice is not totally dead -- it’s still viable if you’ve onlyâ†µgot 15 scholarships, for instance -- but its most outlandish excessesâ†µare.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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