No, No, I *Strenuously* Object to Oversigning

This is apropos of not much besides a single wayward tweet in my queue this morning, but I think it's time for Big Ten fans to let the oversigning issue go, especially in regards to the complaint that oversigning creates a competitive imbalance between the conferences. Is the charge true? Yes, probably, at the margins; it's better to have 88 players on scholarship than 85, and if the coach gets to cull the worst three on the roster after personal evaluation rather than having to choose based on high school tape, then there is surely some advantage.


But at this point, after beatdown and beatdown and beatdown with only a few morally ambiguous counterexamples, the complaint rings a little hollow. Oversigning is an issue of marginal improvement, not massive programmatic change. The last three or five or even twenty players on Alabama's roster didn't account for the 42 point loss Michigan State suffered. The difference that mattered was the difference in quality between the top twenty players on both teams, and the gap was every bit as significant there as the gap at the bottom. Alabama could have signed 15 players each of the past four years and still won that game by two touchdowns.


In the meantime, some of the worst offenders don't appear to be reaping much in the way of rewards. The 37-player 2009 Ole Miss class set off much of the firestorm. As redshirt freshmen or sophomores, that class lost to Vanderbilt and failed to make a bowl game; as redshirt sophomores or juniors, that class is predicted to finish last in the SEC West.


Oversigning matters because kids are potentially getting cheated out of promises. It matters because letters of intent are currently only one-way commitments, leaving players at the mercy of coaches who themselves are increasingly at the mercy of fan bases calling for wins at any cost. But bemoaning that the Big Ten is *thisclose* to breaking through yet held back by its scrupulously scrupulous practices has more than a little bit of whinyness about it. The three star linebacker in Jackson who signs up to play for Houston Nutt and gets cut next year is the real victim, not Michigan State or Ohio State.

ESPN Ombudsman: We Totally Suspended Bruce Feldman, But You Are Ignorant For Calling It That

Blech:

The recent flap over Bruce Feldman's non-suspension for writing a book on behalf of a guy now suing ESPN for libel has been characterized as (A) a Twitter revolution, (B) an ESPN house of cards, (C) Twitterati gone wild.

In fact, it's all of the above and more. To date, this is the most complicated ESPN issue we've tackled at the Poynter Review Project.

Here are some of our findings, based on a weekend of reporting:

What s strange circumlocution: your findings based on a weekend of reporting? Whose reporting? Yours? ESPN's? Anyway, lets get to it.

 ESPN did not suspend Feldman. Instead managers asked him Thursday to not publish anything online, or go on the air, for what turned out to be roughly 24 hours, while they figured things out.

Maybe I lack the nuance of an ESPN ombudsman, but being asked to not do your job sounds exactly like a suspension.

The sports gossip blog Sports by Brooks erroneously reported that Feldman had been suspended indefinitely, igniting a Twitter wildfire that has yet to be contained.

So, Feldman was suspended, and he wasn't told how long the suspension would last, but it wasn't an indefinite suspension? I know that both of those words are polysyllabic, but they're not that ambiguous.

 Managers gave Feldman the all-clear on Friday afternoon, but Feldman as of Monday morning had yet to tweet or make any public statements, even to explain why he's not saying anything.

Maybe he's pissed. Maybe he's looking for new employment. Who knows? But notice that there was no acknowledgement that the unprecedented bad publicity played a role in any of this.

ESPN officials approved Feldman's authoring then-Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach's autobiography, long before Leach was fired by the university and sued ESPN. 

When Leach filed the lawsuit against ESPN, it's clear to us that Feldman's involvement with the book became an impossible conflict. But Feldman failed to seek and the network failed to provide clear guidance.

I cannot reconcile these two paragraphs. ESPN gave a thumbs-up, but Feldman didn't seek out guidance? Didn't he get the guidance when he received permission from ESPN to write the book? Also, isn't the continued employment of Craig James an equally, if not more, impossible conflict of interest?


Some of these questions are half-assedly answered later in the column.

 ESPN pointed out the error almost 24 hours later in a news release, igniting further argument over the difference between being suspended and merely being asked to take a break. This is more than just semantics. A suspension is a disciplinary action involving human resources, a record in your file and not being allowed onto the company premises for a period of time. Several people on that phone call reported to us that Feldman specifically asked whether he was being suspended and that he was told no. 

Lying low and staying out of the public eye is different than being forced to stay home from work.

This is lawyer-speak. I am well versed in it. When you are a reporter in the public eye, being told to "lay low" is exactly the same as a suspension, whether or not you go through the official HR channels.


The rest of the article is tut-tutting about not having facts, all based around the faulty premise that it is a fact that Feldman was not suspended. This is not fact.


This saga also opens up a question of whether ESPN can be trusted about any reporting in the future, especially when quotes like this enter the public domain:

As the college football season heats up, ESPN must still figure out what Feldman can report on independently. When a reporter has a clear conflict, it's standard in journalism to isolate that reporter from the conflict. Having authored a book in Leach's voice, Feldman clearly can't cover Leach, or Texas Tech, anymore. Leach's former staffers, who are now spread far and wide -- some of them now head coaches -- make for questionable material too. Is the entire Big 12 off limits? Feldman's bosses, King and Millman, are still trying to figure that out, which probably explains Feldman's self-imposed silence.

Why stop at Feldman? Given ESPN's conflict of interest, can any reporter be trusted to report on Leach, Leach's coaching tree, or the Big 12? Given the Big Ten's (And Pac 12's) growing independence from the network, can they be trusted to report on the conference accurately? When you have a virtual monopoly on sports journalism broadcasting in many markets, are those markets completely foreclosed from accurate reporting on a subject because of those conflicts of interest. Oh, and while we are in Conflict of Interest Land,  what about the accusations that Spaeth Communications (employed by Craig James) was providing ESPN reporters with most of their information during the Adam James saga.


Here's a simple rule of thumb: when the entire non-affiliated relevant broadcasting says that what you are going is slimy, you are going to need to do better than finely parsing the definition of the word suspension. And if your ombudsman can't see what every other journalist immediately saw, then why bother having an ombudsman?

So, Should We Ignore All That BCS Stuff?

Jim Delany is none too pleased with southern and western (read: non-Big Ten) domination of the college baseball world series:  

College baseball isn't fair to Big Ten schools, Delany says. And for 10 years, he's fought like hell to level the playing field. He gives himself an “A” for effort.

“But if I were giving myself a grade for getting on base and driving in runs, it would be a very low grade.”

Perception says the Big Ten doesn't care about baseball. But no administrator in America has pressed harder to revamp the system. Delany's biggest ideas:

• Adopt a national start date in March or April and move the season deeper into summer.

• Devalue the RPI, which favors Sun Belt schools.

• Ditch the current method of national seeding and return to regional qualification for the College World Series.

College baseball's answer: No. No. No.

Then, last summer, Delany formally proposed the CWS move from eight teams to 10, with the two new slots reserved for cold-weather schools. Cold shoulder again.

“I've got no more proposals,” Delany told the World-Herald. “I'm out of ideas. What else can we possibly do?”

 In response to Delany's proposals, Sun Belt commissioner Wright Walters had this to say:

The problem is you want your conference to take away opportunities for my teams, to play on the stage our teams created in 1947.

Just kidding! That's what Delany said, with a few minor alterations, about BCS access this past winter when the Mountain West pitched a fit about the uneven playing field.


I supported Delany then, and I support the principal now. The major conferences, Big Ten and SEC foremost among them, drive most of the interest in college football. The stage is their stage, and if they don't care to cut ever-larger slices to conference that cannot fill 30,000 person stadiums, then swell. But the converse applies as well in those rare circumstances where the Big Ten can't compete against the big boys like, uh, Cal State Fullerton and Fresno State. The College World Series is their big stage, and the Big Ten shouldn't be guaranteed a few spots on that stage just because it has teams north of the 40th parallel. 

Screw the MEAC

I'm sympathetic to complaints that the Big Ten and other major conferences are trying to put the screws to mid-majors because, hey, I actually agree with that. The ur-text to the announcement about the Big Ten maybe possibly perhaps looking into providing its players with a little something for expenses was that maybe it's time for the MAC to GTFO of Division I, or at least the juicy, expensive part of Division I. Your feelings about that will probably depend upon your attachment to the Western Michigan athletic program and its ilk.


So I can at least understand the concerns about the Big Ten proposal being an iron fist of robber baron competitiveness in the velvet glove of student-athlete wellbeing, even if I disagree with them. This, on the other hand, is just nonsense:

The NCAA just hammered some schools from the SWAC and MEAC for low graduation rates, which I find ironic -- given that the NCAA shows absolutely no intelligence at all by delivering that punishment. 

Of the 58 harshest penalties handed out by the NCAA for poor APR results, half of them went to schools in those two conferences, a lopsided amount given that historically black schools account for just 7 percent of NCAA's Division I. 

This isn't a black thing or a white thing, of course. It's a money thing. And leagues like the SWAC and MEAC -- leagues without BCS football or high-major (or even mid-major) basketball -- have no money at all. 

Schools such as UConn and Tennessee and Florida and UCLA have ample money to pay for incredible academic support services for athletes -- tutors, computers, advisors. Meanwhile, student-athletes in poorer leagues like the SWAC and MEAC make do with very little of that.

Part of the Grand Bargain that schools make by having athletic programs is that they have to make at least an honest pretense of educating the players. These are schools, after all. And we understand that, by and large, the kids playing football and basketball wouldn't have gotten into the universities if not for their athletic ability, and we understand that they are likely to struggle with their schoolwork more than the average student, so we expect that these schools (that word again) will provide the necessary resources for them to succeed. That's doubly true in the low conferences; the idea that kids at Prairie View A&M will be making a living on the hardwood is optimistic to the point of lunacy.


If Hampton or Coppin State or Jackson State can't even educate its players, then what the hell are they doing? They certainly aren't competing on the field (Kenpom has the MEAC and SWAC as the worst two autobid conferences in already-bloated D-I basketball). If they don't have the resources to compete or the resources to prepare its students for their future, maybe it's time for those schools to think for a few moments about their priorities. If they "don't have money at all," then stop spending that absence of money on D-I basketball and start spending it on more important things, like your students.

Will Paying Players Destroy College Basketball?

I absolutely love John Gasaway, the original Big Ten Wonk, but I have to admit that I think this isn't the most compelling argument he has ever made:

If the Big Ten wants players in its revenue sports to have “full cost of attendance” scholarships, the league has the resources to make it happen. (They have the resources to make it happen even assuming the bottom-line figure would need to be doubled and shared with an equal number of non-revenue athletes in women’s sports to survive Title IX scrutiny.) But creating these new dollarships, while merely cementing existing imbalances in college football recruiting in place, would revolutionize college basketball recruiting overnight. The elite high school football player already chooses between programs that can afford full cost of attendance scholarships. Not so the top high school basketball talent. In a sport where TV exposure and NCAA bids are spread (relatively) far and wide, talent currently has far less incentive to travel in packs. That will change, dramatically, when major conference programs can offer recruits a better financial package than what mid-majors are able to afford. 

These are two very different sports — each with its own very different revenue model — and if you ask me if they share any needs in common I would cite just two things: better athletic directors and a new definition of amateurism. If you’re concerned that the very same SEC West football coaches who make plainly unprincipled decisions receive millions of dollars while their players struggle to afford a plane ticket home, the solution is two-pronged: 1) principled athletic directors creating compensation packages more aligned with empirical reality than with the HR equivalent of the mid-00s housing bubble; and 2) allowing stars in any college sport to strike whatever deals they can with agents and advertisers. Meantime tell college football no one wants them exporting their stale oligarchical ways to the one revenue sport where surprises actually happen.

During the course of the last paragraph, Gasaway links to his essay on amateurism, which I encourage everyone to read when they get the opportunity. The Readers' Digest version is that the NCAA should allow deals between athletes and third-parties such as agents and clothing manufacturers, a suggestion with which I agree.


But the juxtaposition of that article and the complaints quoted above is jarring. NCAA protestations aside, the reason that college athletes have not been allowed to pursue these opportunities is because the playing field will be skewed even further towards major teams; Longhorns will sell a lot more jerseys than Owls of either the Rice or Temple variety. 


Of course, it is already conventional wisdom that the Big Ten made their proposal to put the screws to the MAC and the Sun Belt, so Gasaway's point might seem irrefutable. But the scheme only works because football teams are massive. Basketball programs only get 13 scholarships; an extra $5000 per scholarship is only $65,000 per year, or approximately one-and-a-half secretaries. Title IX will require an extra 13 Super Scholarships in women's sports as well, but we're still only at $130,000 per year, and if the athletic department at Long Beach State can't scrounge that together, maybe Division I just isn't for them.


Besides, it's doubtful whether slightly different compensation for athletes would even mean The End of Long Beach State, either in reality or in concept. Assuming that only the major conferences (major defined as "BCS auto-qualifying") adopt the Super Scholarship proposal and that those teams recruit three basketball players a year, that means about 222 recruits each year will accept major conference scholarships. (I'll call it 225 for simplicity's sake). Of the Rivals Top 150 recruits for 2011, only 16 are headed to "mid-major" teams anyway, even without Super Scholarships. (Those recruits are headed to Memphis, Charleston, Xavier (3), BYU, Harvard, Alcorn State, SMU, Western Kentucky (2), North Texas, Houston, George Mason, New Mexico, and Butler). And even of those schools, several would be either certain to pay the small amount of money (Xavier, BYU, Butler, maybe SMU, North Texas, and George Mason) or aren't paying money anyway (Harvard). A few players each season will choose Iowa State or Depaul over Wichita State because of the extra $10 a day, but is this really going to be enough to upset whatever balance of power exists in college basketball?


More likely, this proposal, like death, will focus the minds of athletic directors around the country. Men's basketball is still a revenue sport even as football drains athletic department coffers. Rather than pouring endless resources into football, many mid-level schools may decide that the Cinderella-friendly nature of college basketball provides greater bang for the athletic department buck. And unlike third-party contracts, compensation is capped; a top recruit is turning down perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars by choosing to play for Detroit or Central Michigan rather than Ohio State if they get to sell their personages while on campus. If competitive balance is the concern, the Big Ten proposal should be seen as the lesser of two evils by college hoops fans.

Schools Are Not Profiting From Bowl Games. So What?

This post from the Wiz of Odds caught like wildfire on the intertubes yesterday, and I'd be remiss if I didn't comment:

When the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) announced matchups for its five games last December, the Fiesta Bowl was handed the biggest clunker of them all — Connecticut vs. Oklahoma. 

But Fiesta officials never had to worry about monetary risk because they were handing off the financial burden to the Huskies and Sooners. 

Each team, as part of the agreement to play in the Glendale, Ariz., game, had to purchase 17,500 tickets with a face value between $105 and $235. 

Combined, Connecticut and Oklahoma sold only 8,338 of their allotted 35,000 tickets. That left the schools and their conferences on the hook for a jaw-dropping $5.14 million in "absorbed" tickets — or tickets that go unsold to the public or have to be purchased by the university for use by staff, families of players, coaches and even the band. 

Last season marked a record 35 bowl games and nearly every game required teams to purchase a minimum number of tickets. Teams, in search of prestige, never hesitate to take on the financial burden.

The Fiesta Bowl sales were going to be awful no matter what because Connecticut; this is an unavoidable truth. That the two largest ticket-gorges came from the two schools playing in Tempe is completely unsurprising. Had this been an opening round matchup at a neutral site of a playoff, no one would have went either. Connecticut.


There are two takeaways from this though, one negative and one neutral. The negative story isn't the "losses" from the Fiesta Bowl (the BCS and bowl payouts will more than compensate those schools), but the losses from the crap bowls that feature Sun Belt vs Conference USA. Those teams absolutely have to attend those crap bowls, because a refusal to attend would annihilate recruiting for years ("why go to Northern Illinois when they won't even go to the bowl game they earned?") That may work for Notre Dame but not Ball State, but when Ball State can't pay the bills anyway, adding an extra six figures in ticket losses is downright disgraceful. 


But this is only a problem at schools that, relatively speaking, no one cares about; that's why it's a problem. The big schools lose money on bowls because they don't try to make money on bowls. For just one example, Wisconsin picked up the tab for over a thousand people to make the multi-day trip to Pasadena, including a few hundred band members and other extremely marginal members of the team. The players stay in nice hotels, take in Disneyland, eat expensive meals, etc. There is plenty of fat to be cut, except that, why cut the fat? The fat is where all the flavor is, and if athletic programs want to reward their teams for good seasons rather than hoarding a little extra money, then why not go ahead? I'd rather have teams willingly go into the red and players have themselves an experience of a lifetime than know that the program maximized its earning potential on behalf of the coaching staff salaries that will inevitably absorb that money.


Of course, it's only the Wisconsins and Ohio States that have that luxury. For Central Florida and UTEP, a bowl trip is just another game with a huge ticket bill tacked on. Those schools aren't merely forgoing profit for the sake of their players. Then again, if the alternative is just eliminating postseason play for those schools, I'm not sure they'd appreciate that either.