No school had ever lost 11 underclassmen to the NFL draft.  Not until this past winter when 11 LSU Tigers told head coach Les Miles they would be making the jump to the professional ranks, that is.

Quite naturally, the coach has tried to turn that negative into a positive… on the recruiting trail:

“The situation is a reality in our program.  We did a great job developing our guys, and investing in them.  And what’s happening is that three-and-outs are reality.  We’re going to have to enjoy the success that those guys can have in three and out.

I still believe that there are opportunities (for players to return) to raise their draft status.  The two pieces to whether you stay is whether you raise your draft status and the opportunity to make it and stay in the NFL.  To me, when you’re ideally placed to be drafted high and to be in a position where you have to find your worth and your abilities but you will make a team — those guys are really welcome to leave (school) and, in many instances, will.”

Cut through the standard Miles doubletalk and you’ll easily grasp the coach’s message to prospects — “Hey, kid, we can get you ready for the NFL lickety-split.”

Michael Carvell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes that “some are wondering if the coach works for a university… or an NFL farm system.”  In reality, the answer is both.

Miles is aware of the current college sports landscape and he’s adapting to it, not unlike John Calipari at Kentucky.  No rules are being broken.  Heck, those who abhor the NCAA might even say Miles and LSU are helping young men break free from the bonds of Mark Emmert faster, allowing them to make money sooner.

Still, if Miles were to be honest, one would guess he’s not thrilled about having to replace so many players ahead of schedule.  Faced with that issue, however, he has to put a proper spin on it.  And he has.  So anyone upset with Miles’ comments regarding three-and-outs should first ask themselves this question: “What was Miles supposed to say?”

It was little more than a year ago when then-Wisconsin head coach Bret Bielema complained of Urban Meyer — who’d moved from Florida to Ohio State — bringing his SEC recruiting tactics to the Big Ten.  In Jim Delany’s league, there had been a gentlemen’s agreement that kept Big Ten coaches from recruiting players who’d already committed to other Big Ten programs.  Meyer violated that unwritten rule and Bielema responded by saying this:

“We at the Big Ten don’t want to be like the SEC — in any way, shape or form.”

Bielema spent one more year in Madison before moving to Arkansas this past offseason.

Well, Michael Carvell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught up with South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier and asked him if he thought should be such a gentlemen’s agreement in college football.  According to Carvell, “that got a good laugh from the Ol’ Ball Coach” who then said:

“No, because the situation could change for a young man.  Then all of a sudden, maybe (the college where he’s committed) is maybe not the best place for him — whereas six months ago, it looked like the best place for him…

Sometimes things change from when a kid commits in the summer and by the end of his senior season.  Sometimes the coach may get fired, or whatever.  Something may happen — this, that or the other.  Maybe a kid gets a better offer.  It’s going to happen when you commit six months before signing day.”

Anyone else think that Spurrier — a man high-skilled in the art of needling — will poke a little fun at Bielema’s pas Big Ten/SEC comment during the SEC’s spring meetings in Destin?

Last month, Georgia signee Davin Bellamy tweeted that during one of his last in-home visits from a coaching staff, “a school spent an hour and (a) half telling me why I shouldn’t go to Georgia.”

Michael Carvell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught up with a number of SEC coaches, including UGA’s Mark Richt to get their take on negative recruiting.  A sampling:

“…If you hear me talking about another school, if I’m you, I’m not going to listen much to what I have to say.  but when I tell you about Georgia and the reality of what’s going on at Georgia, then I want you to believe what I’m telling you.  We try to make sure that we’re going about it (in) a very positive way, and talkinga bout great things at Georgia.”

– Mark Richt, Georgia

“There were a lot of false accusations they (rival coaches) were using against the University of Tennessee in the recruiting process.  All I can speak of is what we’re going to do here at the University of Tennessee, and we’re going to do nothing but sell our football program and present the fact to prospective student-athletes.”

– Butch Jones, Tennessee

“It’s all over the place.  We hear it consistently from a lot of different angles.  I think when you have a really good product to sell, you can focuse on your product.”

– James Franklin, Vanderbilt

Read the rest of this entry »

As college sports fans wait to see if the NCAA backs away from the controversial rule changes its scheduled to adopt this summer, coaches and administrators continue to share their two cents.  Today, Mississippi State’s Dan Mullen is a pair of pennies lighter thanks to an interview with Michael Carvell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In case you’re wondering, Mullen likes the idea of sending unlimited text messages to recruits and he’s also in favor of an early signing period.  He also gave his take on the NCAA’s decision to erase dead periods from the recruiting calendar.  Many believe that decision will lead to an overload of communication for the prospects as well as to a further loss of family time for coaches.  (“If the rival school’s coach is texting on Christmas Day, I’d better be texting on Christmas Day.”)

Mullen has a solution:

“I don’t want to want to sound like a non-worker, but everybody worries about these new rules, and how you will be working 24 hours per day.  They want to know where is your down time?  If they want a time for where coaches have to shut it down, then you designate four weeks in the summer where you’re completely off.  You can do no recruiting during those four weeks, and you’ve eliminated the problem for all coaches.

Currently, we have eight weeks where we’re not allowed to do anything with our (current) players.  You can do that for coaches with recruiting, too.  You would let the schools pick their four weeks because schools get out earlier in the South than they do up North.  Schools up North, they would need later recruiting times to do camps and summer visits.  You can pick your four weeks, and move from there.  So for four weeks, you can’t do anything during the summer.”

If the NCAA presidents are looking for a happy medium between the over-regulated system of the past and the anarchy that’s currently scheduled to take effect, Mullen’s plan would fit that bill.  Allowing recruits and coaches at least some relief from the recruiting war would not be a bad way to go.

The only problem with Mullen’s plan is giving schools the opportunity to pick their own off weeks.  Some recruits — whether the situation has been explained to them or not — won’t understand why Coach X stops calling for a month while Coach Y continues to dial and text.  Other than that, we’d give Mullen’s idea the MrSEC.com stamp of approval.

During a conversation with Michael Carvell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia hoops coach Mark Fox said all the right things regarding student-athletes who wish to transfer, at least from the perspective of most media and fans.  Ironically, the scribe and the coach still wound up having what the reporter calls a “spirited” Q&A.

Fox is a coach who believes kids should be able to transfer wherever they like so long as there’s been no tampering on the part of another school.  Fair enough, though we’ve written many times that in today’s PR-first world, coaches can’t win points by claiming tampering.  As soon as a coach restricts a player’s transfer options, he’s made himself a target for negative recruiting.  That said, Fox has no problem allowing players to transfer — even within his own conference — which is a rarity among most coaches:

“I think as coaches, as long as there hasn’t been tampering, I don’t see why you should preclude a kid on going somewhere where they can pursue their lifelong goals.  I don’t think, in those situations, that there’s any reason to try to steer them away from any particular school.”

I don’t know about you, but I like that answer.  But Carvell chose to follow up by asking what Fox thought about the recent backlash against coaches who “can move freely at a moment’s notice” yet still choose to restrict their players’ movements.  Again, Fox had already made it clear that he wasn’t one of those coaches.  But when hit with the “can move freely at a moment’s notice” part, Fox apparently bristled:

“That’s not true.  Coaches can’t move around freely.  Coaches are bound by buyout agreements and everything else.  That’s not accurate.  If I wanted to leave Georgia, which I don’t and never want to … there’s a buyout in my contract that discourages that from occurring.  For those who say coaches go wherever they want to go, that’s not true.  I think in 90-percent of the contracts, there’s a buyout provision that if a coach would leave, there would be something given to the school that he’s leaving.  I don’t think that has been portrayed accurately.  I think the big issue was when there has been tampering that leads to a transfer, there ought to be, from athletic director to athletic director, some ability in place for them to restrict kids to go to schools that have tampered with the current situation.”

What appears to be a bit of a tiff between two men who actually both believe players should be allowed to transfer at their will only escalated from there:

Carvell:  ”I realize that transfer restrictions can be a complex issue inside college basketball circles.  But I do think mainstream America sees it as ‘Why should coaches be able to move on and players can’t?’ like you mentioned.  That’s how they are seeing it.”

Fox:  “Why do they feel that way?  Because they read what Seth Davis or Michael Carvell write.  I’m glad you’re doing the story so you can accurately portray it.  Again, we’ve got no issues with any of it because I don’t have any guys leaving right now.  If, when we’ve had some guys leave, we’ll let them go wherever.”

Now that’s a hoot.  Two guys on the same side of an argument going tit-for-tat over a side issue.  Carvell might have been better taking his questions to Bo Ryan, the Wisconsin coach who recently got lit up like a Christmas tree for trying to bar one of his ex-players from playing at half the schools on the North American continent.  Instead he happened to find a coach who’s open to letting kids go… and he still managed to rile him up.

This is no knock on Carvell who we link to often and who’s writings we enjoy.  But in this case, it seems Fox’s first answer should have nixed the line of questions the reporter had prepared.

1. Linebacker Corey Vereen decided to end his recruitment and commit to Tennessee on Friday.

2. Florida and Florida State are the top two schools for Miami defensive end Stacy Thomas.

3. Was Georgia’s junior day a success or failure? Michael Carvell weighs in for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

4. Here’s a report from a 7on7 event in Atlanta on Saturday. Several SEC prospects took part.

5. Alabama commit O.J. Howard was one of the top players at the Nike Combine in Mobile, Ala.

6. Lineman Josh Outlaw visited Clemson this weekend. He will likely visit Florida and South Carolina soon.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contacted Derek Dooley to get his thoughts on the SEC new soft 25-man signing cap.  Tennessee’s coach did not disappoint the folks at The AJC.  Dooley made it clear that he believe oversigning is a good thing, a useful tool.  Like most coaches, he’s aghast at the suggestion that some in his profession might not live up to the word they give to recruits.

The piece is long and fascinating.  It’s worth your time.  And it will also have some SEC presidents shaking their heads.

Here are a few excerpts:

“I thought the rule we had in place before was a great rule, a fair rule. I think the perception is that oversigning is bad for the student-athlete. I would argue the opposite. I think oversigning is good for the student-athlete. Let me give you some hypotheticals: Let’s say a a guy gets hurt his senior year, and there’s a good chance he won’t play his freshman year of college. He has got to do surgery and rehab. What could we do in the past? In the past, we could sign him, grayshirt him and put him in next year’s class. That allowed him to come to the type of school he wanted to come to, whereas now those kind of guys have to go to a different school. So that’s the first scenario. The second scenario is let’s take a guy who academically not eligible. That situation happened to me this December. You look at their mid-year grades and you see that they’re going to be an academic risk, or there’s a good chance that they won’t qualify. Well, then you have to make a decision. Because in the past, you could sign them and if he didn’t qualify, place him in a junior college, help him get into a junior college and give him the motivation to come back to your school one day. Now you can’t sign him, or you’re not willing to take that risk because you can’t be short on your roster. So now they’re more on their own, and they don’t get to sign with the school that they want to go to. So there’s a lot of good things about oversigning that gives more opportunities for good players. When you eliminate that, now you’re providing less opportunities for them…

Here’s the comedy of all of this. What we’ve done is not really eliminate oversigning. Here’s why I say that: if you have only 20 spots to give on your roster, you can oversign by five. The only schools that can’t oversign are the ones that have 25 openings [Note: SEC schools can sign more if they have early enrollees that can be back-counted to the previous year’s class]. So we try to say in the media that we’ve stopped oversigning in the SEC but we haven’t. And I would argue that oversigning is not a bad thing, and it has been a healthy thing for college football, and it has been a healthy thing for the student-athletes. It just has been painted negatively by one or two exceptional cases that happened over the last five years.”

We agree with Dooley that oversigning hasn’t been completely quashed in the SEC.  That’s why we’ve called the cap a “soft” cap from the moment it passed.

Michael Carvell of The AJC also asked Dooley why other coaches — who he says agree with him — aren’t willing to be as outspoken against the new rule as he is.  He answered for himself… and his old boss, Nick Saban:  “I can tell you more feel that way. It’s a matter of if they are willing to say it or not. I know Nick Saban feels the same way I feel. He may not tell you that. But a lot of us are at the mercy of our school presidents. Where we failed as coaches is we did not do a good job of communicating the positives of oversigning and being on the front end of the argument. So now we find ourselves in a real defensive posture. I think the important thing is that we need to find a way to allow oversigning and eliminate the abuses that came with it. I’m not for putting a young man in a bad situation. If there’s a way we can maintain oversigning and eliminate any of the abuses that caused the concerns, then that’s what I would be for. Because there are so many positive benefits of oversigning for the players.”

Perhaps.  But there aren’t many high school coaches, high school players or parents of high school players who are trumpeting the positives of oversigning these days… just football coaches.

And while Dooley and the rest of the SEC’s coaches — a group that voted 12-0 to keep the old rule in place last spring — might view oversigning as a good thing, no collection of schools outside the South oversigned as frequently as those in Mike Slive’s league.  What’s good for the rest of the country should be good for the SEC as well.  Especially when — as Dooley pointed out — it’s not a real “hard” cap in the first place.

Defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson from Henry County High School in McDonough, Ga., will choose among Alabama, Georgia and Georgia Tech on Wednesday.

And a few members of the media are predicting Tomlinson will choose Alabama.

“I feel he’ll be putting the Bama hat on Wednesday,” ESPN recruiting analyst Jamie Newberg told 680 The Fan in Atlanta on Monday.

Michael Carvell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution predicted the same decision when he was asked on Sunday.

“The atmosphere makes you feel more comfortable down there,” recently said of Alabama during an interview with ESPN.com.

Tomlinson, who will announce his decision on Wednesday, is considered the nation’s 42nd-best defensive tackle by ESPN. Other schools to offer Tomlinson include Auburn, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Southern California.

1. Florida coach Will Muschamp believes the Gators need bigger running backs to play in Charlie Weis’ offense.

2. SEC offensive tackle prospect Andrus Peat plans to visit Stanford.

3. Florida’s newest commit, tight end Kent Taylor, was suspended for Friday’s game.

4. Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen isn’t a fan of the current “recruiting rankings” system.

5. Michael Carvell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asks if playing Florida in Jacksonville hurts Georgia’s recruiting.

6. Top wide receiver Dorial Green-Beckham will “definitely” visit Arkansas. (ESPN Insider)