The Coaches Show: Week 7 analysis

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Home Home « Fantasy Faux Pas Monday: RB RoulettePlaybook: Jets’ disguise in coverage might have fooled Rivers »NewsThe Coaches Show: Week 7 analysisBy Brian Billick |
Published: October 24th, 2011 | Tags: The Coaches Show

Brian Billick and Jim Mora discuss the hottest topics from around the league, including young quarterbacks making an impact, the Lions’ backslide, and an examination of the pros and cons of the “Wide 9? defense.

Subscribe to the Coaches Show Podcast on iTunes.

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The Quad: Live Analysis: Third Saturday of October

Pete Thamel is the national college sports reporter for The Times, where his primary responsibilities are college football and basketball. He is in his sixth season with The Times, witnessing everything from the Bush Push at Notre Dame to Ian Johnson's sideline engagement at the Fiesta Bowl to Mario Chalmers's long 3-pointer to give Kansas the national championship. Before joining The Times, Thamel covered college sports for ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine, The Syracuse Post-Standard and The Daily Orange. A native of Ware, Mass., Thamel graduated from Syracuse University in 1999.

Connor Ennis has been a staff editor in the sports department of The New York Times since November 2006. Before coming to the Times, he worked for The Associated Press, where he was a supervising editor on the national sports desk in New York. While with the AP, he covered the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. A native of Dallas, Pa., he graduated from Syracuse University in 2000.

Ray Glier is a freelance reporter who, in addition to The New York Times, contributes to USA Today, AOL FanHouse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald and Unboundary, a strategy/communications firm based in Atlanta. Glier is a graduate of West Virginia University.

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Analysis: Tweaks in B.C.S. Could Results From Conference Changes

Those were the good old days, before a wave of off-the-field scandal and realignment uncertainty engulfed the sport, the real-time drama distracting everyone from the annual end-of-season headaches.

But with the release of the B.C.S. standings Sunday night, the potential for college football’s season to end with a lot of unhappy undefeated teams became clear. There are nine undefeated teams that could make a case that they should play for the title — sorry, No. 19 Houston, you’re not one of them — and yet another awkward finish appears likely.

But perhaps more important, with so much big-picture change brewing, the biggest question among the sport’s administrators is whether the shifts in conferences’ makeup will result in significant changes to the B.C.S.

As the tumult of conference expansion has defined the past three months, the B.C.S. coordinator, Bill Hancock, has been calling commissioners and administrators to brainstorm about potential changes. The B.C.S. contract expires at the end of the 2013 regular season, and Hancock said a mechanism had been set up for B.C.S. leadership to discuss potential changes. Hancock said changes would be determined in the next calendar year, as they have to be prepared to be presented to ESPN for its exclusive negotiation window by next fall.

“Because it is so early in the process, it wouldn’t be appropriate to even try to describe the general direction right now, except to say that I am hearing little to no sentiment for an F.C.S.-style playoff,” Hancock wrote in an e-mail Sunday. He was referring to the Football Championship Subdivision, which has a playoff format for its national title.

Hancock added that the integrity of the regular season and the bowl experience were priorities to be preserved, which are familiar talking points. The party line from university presidents has always been that a playoff in college football would interfere with academics, spoil the regular season and professionalize a sport that is having difficulty rationalizing its vestiges of amateurism.

But even with conferences seemingly growing as fast as television contracts are increasing in value, the resistance to extreme change in the B.C.S. is severe.

The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, who has long been an advocate of the sport’s vibrant regular season and his league’s relationship with the Rose Bowl, said it was a leap to think that bigger leagues were a gateway to a playoff system.

“That’s not a logical conclusion,” he said in a phone interview Sunday. “The reasons people do or don’t judge a viewpoint on the system is not related to the size of a conference.”

There are a few possible B.C.S. discussions that everyday fans would care about. That would include adding a B.C.S. bowl game — the Cotton Bowl is commonly mentioned — to increase the number of B.C.S. bids and changing the limit of two teams per conference for B.C.S. games.

During the build-up to the current B.C.S. contract, there was a formal discussion of whether leagues would favor the so-called Plus One model, which would essentially have the top four teams play off in the B.C.S.

Just moving to have a discussion about the Plus One model was a big deal, and only the commissioners Mike Slive of the Southeastern Conference and John Swofford of the Atlantic Coast Conference favored it. There was so little interest that a vote wasn’t even taken.

Plus One was ultimately seen as a gateway to a bigger playoff, and college football still appears a long way from trending in that direction. During the expansion boom the past two years, a common refrain was that the march toward 16-team superconferences would inevitably lead to a playoff.

Delany said he did not see that.

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Analysis: Unofficial Visits in N.C.A.A. Recruiting Draw Concern, Not Scrutiny

Just weeks after Southern California Coach Lane Kiffin, who was the coach at Tennessee when the transaction is said to have occurred, appeared to have escaped N.C.A.A. scrutiny from his tumultuous tenure as the Volunteers’ coach, the Yahoo Sports report pulled him back into the N.C.A.A. cross hairs.

Perhaps more important, the report portrays Garza and the Tennessee staff flagrantly disobeying N.C.A.A. rules on unofficial visits. (An unofficial visit is one in which the prospect and his family must pay their way to campus.) Yahoo said Garza paid a third party the money for Seastrunk and his mother to make the trip in July 2009 using a MoneyGram, even providing the receipt.

Coaches, recruiting analysts and an N.C.A.A. official said in interviews that illegal payment for a prospect’s unofficial visit was one of the most commonly manipulated N.C.A.A. rules. While the importance of unofficial visits has increased because of the speeded-up recruiting calendar with unofficial commitments, there is little scrutiny of how prospects and their families pay for the visits.

“It seems to be a real concern,” said Rachel Newman Baker, an N.C.A.A. managing director of enforcement, who said the N.C.A.A. had been studying the issue in both football and basketball. She added, “As we’ve been doing our outreach and meeting with folks, it seems like this has been on top of the list.”

On an official recruiting visit, a prospect’s travel, hotel and meals can be paid for by universities while the prospect visits campus, according to N.C.A.A. regulations. Those visits cannot be taken until the start of the prospect’s senior year of high school.

There are so few perks allowed on an unofficial visit that a university cannot pick up a prospect at the airport or pay for a hotel stay. The N.C.A.A. rulebook has four pages on official visits and one and a half on unofficial visits.

“Behind the scenes in college basketball, people will tell you that the unofficial visit is one of the bigger problems facing recruiting right now,” the ESPN basketball recruiting analyst Dave Telep said. “It’s a place where things can be easily manipulated by third parties. At the same time, I have no idea how you can fix it.”

The problem appears to be as pervasive in college football as it is in basketball. The former coach Urban Meyer said that in the later part of his six-year tenure at Florida, he heard about abuses elsewhere of the unofficial visit rule.

“I’d ask my assistants, ‘Why is this kid not visiting us?’ ” Meyer said. “They’d say, ‘Coach, we’re not paying for his trip.’ ”

According to Drew Cannon, a Duke student who does research for Telep, 51 of Telep’s top 100 senior basketball prospects had already unofficially committed to universities by Sept. 1. Nearly all of the top 100 had made unofficial visits.

Brad Stevens, the Butler men’s basketball coach, said that 90 percent of the official visits during his tenure had involved players who had already made commitments to the Bulldogs.

Because prospects cannot make official visits until the start of their senior year of high school, the official visit has become more of a ceremonial showcase of campus than a critical part of the recruiting calendar.

“It’s totally changed, I would say, in the last five years,” said Dan Dakich, a former college head coach and assistant who now coaches travel basketball and hosts an Indianapolis radio show. “Kids are committing so much earlier, and parents totally understand the process. The people I deal with say, ‘Can you help us get him on campus?’ ”

And that is where problems can occur, especially in a time when unemployment, gas prices and airfares are high.

“I see guys flying across the country or regionally like it’s a rock star tour,” Telep said. “Knowing what I know about some of those situations, I don’t know the means of where this is coming from.”

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