Recruiting: SEC to get richer but when's enough, enough?

Wednesday, Feb. 2, is perhaps the most underrated day on the college football calendar. It's Signing Day, when high school kids announce their college choices, sign on the dotted line, and don the hats.

No other college football moment is so drenched in anticipation and promise. No other moment so satiates the reptilian part of our brains.

Within minutes of the last confetti strand hitting the turf in Auburn's national championship win over Oregon, a great wave of energy washed across millions and millions of computer screens as football fans turned their full attention to recruiting. It grows by the year, and the appeal is almost bestial. There are a certain number of great kids. We all know them. We all want them. When we get them, you can't have them. We get to play Alpha Wolf. We eat first. Everybody else waits.

Of course, there are packs within the packs. The SEC will dominate every "expert's" list of top-ranked recruiting classes. And conference teams are still fighting over some of the top kids who will wait until Wednesday -- or beyond -- to announce their college decisions. Georgia and Alabama are waiting on running back Isaiah Crowell; Florida and LSU (along with FSU) are still in the mix for defensive lineman Tim Jernigan; Cyrus Kouandjio, the country's top offensive prep lineman, has Auburn and Alabama is his final three.

And then there's the big one: the country's top-ranked player, Jadeveon Clowney of Rock Hill, is mulling over a final two of Alabama and his home-state USC Gamecocks. As of now, Clowney will wait until Valentine's Day, his 18th birthday, to announce his choice.

Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Auburn are all primed for trophy-fish classes (among ACC schools: FSU, in another sign that it has risen from the grave where Bobby Bowden had buried it, has a monster list of recruits and may get even more.)

Which brings us to this: Colleges can have no more than 85 players on scholarship at any given time. This causes a rub with the SEC, which allows schools to sign 28 kids every year (though there are common practices to sidestep that number and bring in even more.) So when a team signs up a full boat, someone on scholarship has to leave for schools to stay under the NCAA cap.

Football, as we all know, is filled with attrition: grades, discipline problems, homesickness, injuries -- along with the Great Awakening many kids go through when they discover they don't like football nearly as much when they're not the biggest and meanest player on the field any longer.

Still, other kids lose their scholarships simply because their coaches believe they aren't good enough to get in the way of the rush of unproven talent that signs up every February. It's a practice, as Jon Solomon of the Birmingham News puts it, that's more business model than collegiate opportunity.

The SEC teams, on average, sign a ridiculously higher number of players than most of their rivals across the country. It gives schools an unquestioned advantage over teams from the Big 10 or the ACC. Why the NCAA has refused to standardize signing practices is one of the growing number of mysteries surrounding the erstwhile managing body of collegiate sports.

Is oversigning a bit unseemly? Is it in keeping with a university's mission? Is it any different than tenure tracks and competitive scholarships for dance, theater or research? We can debate the practice through Wednesday or beyond.

At the very least, we should keep in mind that when all that promise arrives at our schools' gates, someone who somehow lost that promise has to go home.

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