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.

mg

Not so 'Little Nicky' enters the draft; in our minds he's going to Carolina

Nick Fairley, the co-MVP of Auburn's national championship team, is going out on a high note.

The nation's top lineman announced this afternoon that he will enter the NFL draft. Fairley is one of a handful of prospects -- most from the SEC -- competing for the No. 1 draft pick of your Carolina Panthers. Read more here

Fairley brutalized quarterbacks and ball carriers -- sometimes beyond the bounds of fair play -- throughout Auburn's unbeaten season. His size, speed and aggressiveness undoubtedly make him an attractive pick to a lot of NFL teams, and he is expected to be the first lineman drafted.

Auburn faces quite the off season. It loses more than 20 seniors along with Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Cam Newton who, like Fairley, is leaving a year early. The NCAA continues to investigate Newton's recruitment.

In fact, Fairley's aggressiveness and the cloud of scandal hanging over Newton made Auburn the most controversial team in college football, as well as the best.

mg

Cam says buh-bye; Fairley next? SEC opponents break out in sweet, sweet song

The amazing one-year saga of Cam Newton came to end Thursday with the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback of Auburn's national championship run, says he'll play for money next year . . .

(OK, that was cheap, I admit it, but all those compliments from the Auburn guys gave me vertigo. The universe must be righted!)

Newton, whose play overshadowed the ongoing investigation into his SEC recruitment, is one of two juniors who helped turn the Tigers from an SEC mid-level performer to the nation's best team. Nick Fairley, Newton's teammate and possibly the top pick in the NFL draft this summer, is expected to announce his plans today.

Newton wasn't at his best against Oregon in Monday's championship game, but he deserves a toilet paper statue at Toomer's Corner for helping his team overcome a 24-0 deficit in Tuscaloosa, perhaps the greatest comeback in Auburn's long football history.

Fans from Georgia, LSU, South Carolina have all volunteered to help Newton pack. Read here.

Mr. College Football has LSU and Alabama in his 2011 Top 5 but picks Oklahoma to win

Another columnist, another opinion on a college football season that's eight months away. Still, Tony Barnhart of the AJC and CBS is to be respected, so his Top 5 list gets a look here.

Soon, the SEC streak has to end, and Barnhart, an SEC guy, thinks 2011 could be the year. His top 2: Oklahoma and Oregon. Both play bigtime offensive football in leagues that don't play much defense. In the past, when teams like these burn through the regular season and meet an SEC defense, the results have been predictable. (Exhibit I, your honor, the last five championship games.)

The top two SEC teams in Barnhart's list, LSU and Alabama, both will have staunch defenses the coming season. Both have big questions to answer, and given the SEC, neither is guaranteed to get out of conference play alive. But if both get good quarterback play, they could be the best two teams in the country.

Funny to see an ACC team on the list. In fact, we're trying not to laugh so loud to wake up Mrs. EXPATS. Florida State is on the rise, head coach Jimbo Fisher is recruiting harder than an Amway exec, and his team did beat two Florida and South Carolina last year. Still, the Noles are breaking in a new quarterback and most of their offensive line.

And with the merciless gantlet FSU faces every year in the ACC . . .

Read on.

Update: Here's Barnhart's review of the season, which just appeared on the AJC's website.

A pre-2011 reading assignment: Predictions, Tarkenton and oversigning players

In the three weeks we have until National Signing Day and the two months or so before spring practice rolls around, let's catch up with a little reading.

First, AJC Columnist Mark Bradley offers his 2011 SEC predictions. No surprises at the top: The two best teams are in the West and are LSU and Alabama.

Two things to watch here. Both teams are scarily deep with talent. But LSU has its quarterback. Alabama must find one. Possibly mitigating that edge is Alabama's home field advantage when the two teams meet next November.

Other Bradley predictions:

Teams on the rise: Tennessee, Mississippi State, South Carolina and Arkansas. Teams on a decline: Ole Miss, Auburn (not so fast, my friend) Florida. Teams in limbo: Georgia. Teams in a stupor: Vandy, Kentucky and Ole Miss.

Speaking of the Dawgs, this is a few days old now, but if you haven't heard it, take a couple of minutes to hear UGA alum Fran Tarkenton's thoughts on Mark Richt and the state of the Georgia program. It easily would qualify as a rant, if it didn't ring so true. Georgia fans chime in, if you please.

Finally, with National Signing Day three weeks off, a note on recruiting.

In his post-BCS Championship column on the SEC's fifth straight title, Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated pointed out that the conference has a clear advantage over other teams because of its practice of oversigning players. NCAA teams are allowed to have 85 kids on scholarship. The SEC caps the number of signings at 28 a year. Do the math: That means teams like Florida, Alabama, LSU and Auburn bring in a lot more players every year than most of their nonconference peers. But to make the numbers work, older players on the roster have to go away. (Staples' SI colleague, Stewart Mandel, has more abut the subject here.)

In the case of the championship game, Auburn had signed 19 more players over the four-year recruiting cycle than Oregon. In fact, in the top-tier bowl games, the SEC had signed dozens of more players than their opponents.

Is that an advantage? Certainly. Interesting to point out that among the SEC's traditional football powers, only Georgia doesn't adhere to the practice, and look where the Dogs have fallen.

Granted, on the academic side, kids lose scholarships if they don't keep their grades, or they don't continue to excel as musicians or dancers or burgeoning scientists. Faculty members disappear if they're denied tenure.

Still, the NCAA should do what it can to instill a standard policy. Until it does, our pride in the SEC's accomplishments can only go so far.

MG

First the BCS, now Survivor: It's an Auburn world

If you didn't get enough of Cam Newton's smile, Nick Fairley's pile drives or Trooper Taylor's chest bumps and backward hat, you're living in the right times.

"Survivor," Popular Culture's most enduring human test-tube, offers a new lab specimen, and she's all Auburn. Suffice to say, she's all in.

As The Hat turns: Les Miles returning to LSU

Word is breaking out all over this morning that the grass in Michigan doesn't necessarily taste better for Les Miles after all.

The LSU coach, who spent a roller-coaster year on the bayou, apparently will stay in Baton Rouge. The announcement comes after Miles sent out more hints than a 16-year-old without a prom date that he would return to his alma mater if offered the job.

LSU went 11-2 under Miles this year, then body-slammed Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl. The Tigers are one of the favorites for the 2011 SEC crown, automatically putting them in the BCS conversation as the SEC goes after its sixth national championship in a row.

Fear the thumb! Fear the Hat?

mg