Steve Spurrier’s idea to ignore non-divisional games and just award division championships based on divisional play — something not done in any other major league, conference, or sport — isn’t being met with a lot of positive response.  Not from the media.  Not from fans outside the Palmetto State.  And not even from SEC commissioner Mike Slive.

Speaking to Jon Solomon of The Birmingham News, Slive correctly pointed out the obvious:

“We certainly can discuss it, but an SEC football game is an SEC football game.  Sitting here first blush without a lot of thought, it would be very hard to decide some games are more valuable than other games.”

Of course it would.  Which is why no one else has ever put forth this kind of proposal.  And if Carolina had reached Atlanta last year over Georgia under similar circumstances, you can be sure Spurrier and the Gamecock Nation wouldn’t be crowing quite so loudly about change today.  About how they really hadn’t deserved to go to Atlanta.

That, of course, is the biggest test to Spurrier’s plan — would he have put it forth if the shoe had been on the other foot?  Most definitely that answer is no.

On other topics, the commish said that the SEC’s new schedule format may not be determined until the league’s presidents get a look at it in Destin at the SEC Meetings (which we suspected all along).  Also, he said that he was “proud of the action taken by the university” of Arkansas once the Bobby Petrino scandal came to light.

In addition, Slive said freshly promoted executive associate commissioner Greg Sankey is now running the daily operations of the SEC office while he focuses on expansion, television and NCAA issues.  For years, many have viewed the SEC’s other executive associate commissioner — Mark Womack — as Slive’s heir apparent.  One now must wonder if Sankey holds the inside track to replace Slive when the current commissioner decides to walk away.

Yesterday, SEC commissioner Mike Slive took part in a roundtable Q&A session with a number of other conference commissioners and media members.  In addition to discussing playoff plans and the future of the BCS, Slive also tackled the idea of athletes being paid.

You might remember that it was Slive last summer who began a national discussion regarding full cost-of-attendance scholarships.  But that doesn’t mean he’s in favor of turning college athletes into semi-professional athletes:

“There’s a very tender line.  We are in the world of academia.  One can get cynical.  But we are in academics.  Therefore, universities are not interested in having professional athletes as a subset of its academic mission.

(But) we are talking about an academic enterprise that has culturally become a phenomenon in a way in which it probably never was designed to be as a form of entertainment, and significant entertainment in football and basketball.”

According to Jon Solomon of The Birmingham News, “Slive said if the day ever happens when college athlete are paid, they will be unaffiliated with the universities.”

At this point, it looks as though a playoff — or Plus-One system — is a foregone conclusion for college football’s postseason.  But after the latest meeting of BCS conference commissioners, it seems there’s still a lot of ground to cover before the make-up of that new system is determined.

SEC commissioner Mike Slive said after this week’s meeting in Dallas:


“There’s no consensus yet on anything.  The first couple of meetings, we talked a lot about just college football in general, the regular season.  This time, less of that and more about how we need to start getting closer to where the rubber meets the road.  And there’s lots of different options, and start to analyze each one of those and the pros and cons that go with them.”


The group of commissioners released a statement yesterday acknowledging a number of issues — already well known — that they’re debating during their discussions:


1.  “Would we play some games on campus or all games on neutral sties?”

2.  “If some games are on campus, is that too much of a competitive advantage?”

3.  “If all games are at neutral sites, would fans be able to travel to two games in a row?”

4.  “How would teams be selected?  By a committee, by the current ranking formula, or by a different formula?”

5.  “When exactly would games be scheduled, considering finals, holidays and our desire to avoid mid-January games?”

In a quick Q&A session with The Memphis Commercial-Appeal, SEC commissioner Mike Slive opened up — sort of — about some of the major issues on fans’ minds these days.  We say “sort of,” because as Slive is wont to do, he didn’t make many definitive statements.

On setting up the SEC new football schedules, Slive opened with one of his favorite lines:


“The First Amendment is alive and well in the SEC.  When we put together this year’s 2012 schedule including our two new members, time was of the essence.  It was very complicated, and I was proud that every athletic director had to give something.  It wasn’t easy, but in the final analysis, we got it scheduled.

Looking ahead, each institution is trying to figure out how to protect their interests, but also what’s in the best interest of the league to help us maintain the success we’ve had.  Some rivalries have been lost nationwide in expansion, and we value rivalries.  Protecting rivalries is something we clearly want to do.  Our goal is get the scheduling done before Destin.”


Two things stand out there.  First, Slive’s comments about protecting rivalries seem to go hand-in-hand with the leaked word that permanent cross-divisional rivalries will remain a part of the SEC’s new format.

Second, Slive makes it clear he wants the schedule set before the SEC Meetings at the end of May.  Perhaps that’s because the league has other business to attend to and he doesn’t want to spend those few days at the beach hammering out future football schedules.  If that’s the case, then we hope the commissioner is currently providing behind-the-scenes “suggestions” to his league’s athletic directors that they put the league first in their decisions.  We’ve said here before that ADs tend to put their own interests first.  The commissioner and the SEC’s presidents are the ones who usually put league-first.  And whatever decision is finally made with regards to scheduling, it needs to be made with league-first motivations.

Regarding the SEC’s projected expansion-related television windfall, Slive said:


“We have started discussions with both our television partners (CBS and ESPN).  We feel adding Texas A&M and Missouri has strengthened us in lots of ways, but it certainly strengthened us in television.”


Big money’s coming, folks.  As we wrote last week, if a weakened Big 12 can make itself additional cash, imagine what a “strengthened” SEC can do at the negotiating table.

In addition to discussing a possible playoff — Slive calls it a “Plus-One” and won’t even say playoff — and possible new bowl partners, the commish was also asked if Memphis would be considered for a future SEC Tournament:


“We’re open for 2017 and 2019, and we try to stay five years ahead.  St. Louis also wants to bid.  We’d certainly welcome Memphis’ interest.  Any city interested should apply.  We don’t have a permanent home, and part of that is intentional.  People like basketball arenas, so we try to work as many arenas in as possible besides going to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.”


Why the SEC can’t cut a deal to play at Philips Arena in Atlanta — as the ACC just did for its tourney — is still a question we have.  But this seems to re-open the SEC Tournament door for the Bluff City, even though its most recent bid was rejected or pulled before being rejected.

Ho-hum.  That’s John Calipari’s attitude toward conference tournaments.  Reading his statements on this week’s gathering in New Orleans, you can almost imagine a pause for a yawn:


“Three games in three days doesn’t prepare you for anything.  We just played a whole league schedule…

Fans spend their vacation money, their rent money, their cigarette money, and they go to this tournament. … You almost feel an obligation.  Let’s go play.”


Well, if they’re blowing their money for smokes on getting to New Orleans, then ya gotta at least show up.  Still, Calipari told The Lexington Herald-Leader that all this is just “prelude” to the NCAA tourney.


“For our league, (the SEC Tournament) has no bearing on seeding.  We proved that last year. …

Maybe one team can play in (to the NCAA tourney, but) they had all season to play in…

Three games in three days is like nothing.  It’s like playing in Maui (in November).  It wears you out…

But we’ll be there.”


Mike Slive’s likely thought: “We’re trying to sell some tickets down here, fella.”

Just a quick note from Nashville where I’ve ventured on some MrSEC.com business…

The SEC’s athletic directors are descending on the Music City as planned for their talks regarding the SEC’s future scheduling formats.  Jeremy Foley (Florida), Greg McGarity (Georgia), Pete Boone (Ole Miss) and David Williams (Vanderbilt) were in and around the lobby as I checked into the Hilton downtown this afternoon.

Perhaps I should slide a copy of this under a few doors.

The ADs will meet in Nashville during this week’s women’s basketball tournament and then reconvene next week in New Orleans to continue talks during the men’s tourney.  Whatever the ADs come up with over the next two weeks will likely have to pass muster with the presidents and commissioner Mike Slive in Destin at the SEC Meetings in late-May, early-June.

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.

Speaking with Tony Barnhart on his CBS Sports Network show, SEC commissioner Mike Slive said that he believes change — in some form — is coming to the BCS system:


“I do think we are gonna see changes.  And I don’t think those changes will be tweaks — that’s the term that we always use.  I think there will be changes.  We’re gonna begin to focus in on all these issues over the next six to nine months with the idea that — no holds barred — that we need to take a look at the entire structure and see what kind of changes need to be made.”


Slive also said that he believes the plus-one idea that he once put forth will once again be discussed, stating that “the climate has changed to some degree.”

You can watch the full clip here:




We noted on the morning after the Alabama-LSU rematch was announced that we believed a plus-one format would likely begin to gain traction in conferences that had — to that point — not favored such a plan.

Not long after our post on that topic, Big 12 interim commissioner Chuck Neinas confirmed our suspicions by saying that he was in favor of a plus-one format getting some discussion.

Now Mike Slive states that he believes he’ll have a lot more support for a plus-one when the BCS commissioners talk about matters in the coming months.

We continue to feel that there’s enough money on the table, enough hollering from the media, and enough dissatisfaction among conference commissioners to finally push through the closest thing to a college football playoff we’ll likely ever see.  (Just be sure to call it a plus-one and not a “playoff.”)

When South Carolina president Harris Pastides said over the weekend that the SEC would go to a nine-game conference schedule, we said, “told ya so.”

When SEC PR man Charles Bloom — and a host of SEC athletic directors — quickly said the league was staying at eight games per year, we said, “not for long.”

So now comes word from SEC Executive Associate Commissioner Mark Womack that the league will not go to a nine-game schedule “at this point.”  So would the league ever go to a nine-game format?  “I don’t know.  That would be up to our ADs and presidents to look at it.  The past has indicated there’s been little support for that.”

He also told The Birmingham News, “I think (Pastides) believes it’s something we’re certainly going to look at or thought it might be an idea.  But it’s a topic that really hasn’t had a lot of discussion at this point.”

“At this point” being a key phrase in all of that.

As we told you yesterday, the president of an SEC school doesn’t make up theories and pass them off as fact to his own student-newspaper.  Pastides said a nine-game conference schedule is coming.  He said schools would have to buy out one of their upcoming non-conference games.  He even guaranteed that Arkansas and South Carolina would continue playing as cross-divisional rivals.  That’s a lot of details for something he “thought” the league “might” consider.

Our take on this matter remains unchanged.

The SEC’s presidents discussed scheduling on some level when they decided to vote in Missouri.  To suggest they never considered scheduling or the impact it would have on their universities’ bottom lines is ridiculous.

Pastides opened his mouth on what most see as the obvious long-term fix.  (We broke it down way back in October and explained why a nine-game schedule would be the best option.)

But coaches and ADs are against the move.  They believe a nine-game schedule will be too difficult and could cost their schools home dates each year.

For that reason, Mike Slive is likely doing what he always does before a key vote… he’s politicking.  When Slive brought up the oversigning issue heading into this past spring’s SEC meetings, most assumed the league’s presidents would defer to their coaches and vote to do nothing.  We suggested that Slive wouldn’t bring the issue to a vote if he didn’t know beforehand that he had the votes needed to make changes.  And he did.  And the coaches were ignored.  And a soft 25-man signing cap was put in place.

Slive is a sharp man.  He knows that the SEC would suffer if schools like Florida and Alabama, Georgia and LSU, Arkansas and Missouri see each other just once every 12 years.  He’s no doubt formulated his plan.  The presidents have an idea of what that plan is. 

But the athletic directors haven’t had their meeting with the commish yet.  When they do, we believe they’ll walk away with the knowledge that the SEC will be going to a nine-game schedule at some point in the not-so-distant future.

The Sporting News reported Saturday evening that “a high-placed SEC source” told the media outlet that Missouri “will be officially announced as the SEC’s 14th team early next week.”

A source also told The Sporting News that Missouri will indeed be placed in the SEC East “to avoid any potential scheduling conflicts with longstanding conference rivalries.”

We wrote on October 21st that Mizzou-to-the-East was the most likely option in our view.  We had been told by multiple SEC sources that the goal was to add Texas A&M and Missouri with as little fuss as possible.  As we explained in this piece, placing Missouri in the East is the path of least resistance as it will allow all of the SEC’s most-played rivalries to roll right along uninterrupted.

According to The Sporting News, there were “numerous reasons” to go slow with a Missouri announcement including the school’s Big 12 exit negotiations and the league’s desire to keep the media focus on LSU-Alabama.  (As we wrote earlier this week, Missouri has been taking a lot of blame from SEC fans for delaying matters, when in fact the Big 12 and the SEC share in the blame for the slowdown, too.)

Mike Slive said Saturday that the SEC will “look into” reworking its television contracts with CBS and ESPN (of course).  “Industry sources” say the SEC is looking at creating a separate television network for its lower-tier non-conference games, too.  (Between May 19, 2010 and September 20th, 2011, we discussed the possibility of an SEC Network on several occasions.  So when you see another site claim in the days ahead that it broke the idea of an SEC Network — and you will — just remember where you saw that possibility first discussed.)

Bottom line — it once again appears that we’re mere hours away from an official announcement on Missouri’s move to the SEC.  But we’ve all been to this point before, haven’t we?