SEC's Slive proposes major NCAA changes

He proposed full-cost scholarships (which tiptoes up to giving stipends, I think), multi-year scholarships instead of the current yearly ones, increasing GPA for incoming players from 2.0 to 2.5, the return of partial qualifiers and allowing the use of social media in recruiting.

http://collegefootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/07/20/slive-lays-out-secs-national-agenda-for-change/

 

A bit like the CEO of Goldman Sachs leading the re-engineering of the U.S. banking system.

 

I wouldn't shoot the messenger on this. A lot of that makes sense.

 

Multiyear scholarships should be a moral imperative. (Slive just became Nick Saban's least favorite person in the world.)

Full-cost scholarships are not practical for much/most of Division I. Full-cost football scholarships means full-cost women's swimming scholarships.

Also the SEC might as well demand GPAs of 4.0 for all returning players, because nobody is getting a true education anyway so they should just make the myth as rosy as possible and send everybody to the same Recreation classes Jeremiah Masoli is taking.

 

Not really. As previously noted here and elsewhere, it would mean full cost scholarships for those athletes on full rides. That number, at even the biggest schools, is in the low hundreds.

And, at most schools that are also research institutions, they are sending out more money to the braniacs than the jocks.

 

Women's swimming gets more full scholarships than men's basketball. In fact most of the women's sports get more scholarships in order to balance out football -- for instance in women's soccer the scholarship max 14, but in men's soccer it is 9.9.

If the scholarships add $3,000 to the bill for each athlete, that would cost as much as $1 million more per athletic department. At some schools -- in big cities on the coasts where cost of living is higher -- the full cost would be much more than an extra $3,000. The added expense is fine for the SEC schools, but across the country more schools than not are running budget deficits in the athletic department, and some are borrowing from the university. They would have to eliminate sports to find that extra funding.

Yeah, schools are sending out money to the "brainiacs," but A) most of that money is sponsored either by alumni endowment or corporate grant; and B) the "brainiacs" are kinda sorta the reason the school exists.

 

This. Why is this even an issue? By definition, its an "institute of higher learning" not "institute of athletics" right?

 

But how many of those scholarships are given in full? Don't most non-revenue sports give partials? For instance, women's soccer might get 14 scholarships but the coach divides them among 20 players.

 

2.5 GPA just means that in the SEC, the kids doing the work for the athletes will have to work a little harder.

 

If this was coming from anyone else, I'd think, "mmm, not a bad idea." Coming from Mike Slime, my first impulse is to check to make sure I still have my wallet.

 

I suppose they could try to get around it that way, but I don't see how that could survive Title IX when there are 120 men (football and basketball) and only 12 women (basketball) getting this benefit. I read it to mean the "full cost" calculation would extend to the partials as well.

 

I miss the old Live from SEC Media Days threads.