A bad idea took another step forward on Tuesday as the Falcons and the Georgia World Congress Center Authority agreed to a memorandum of understanding to build a new open-air stadium for the Falcons just up the road from the Georgia Dome.

Why this is a bad idea makes a lot more sense if you put on your Gary Stokan hat and stop thinking about the Dome as simply the place where the Falcons play. If you can remember the Atlanta sports scene prior to 1990, the biggest national sports events were limited to the Omni. And even the Omni didn’t host much of significance after the 1970s. The Dome transformed Atlanta from a city that couldn’t host much more than the 1993 Women’s Final Four into a contender for any world-class sporting event. Without the Dome, there was no Olympics. Without the Dome, there was no Super Bowl. Without the Dome, the SEC Championship game is in New Orleans. You can keep going – the Final Four and NCAA Regionals, ACC and SEC basketball tournaments…dozens of modern national and regional sporting events the city just wasn’t able to handle prior to the Dome’s constructions.

OK, so what? We’ll still have the Dome, right? No one is proposing to tear it down. I’ll go back to a post I made last spring when this first came up:

A new stadium wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of the Dome, but the management of two large facilities could reasonably strain resources. A Georgia Dome in disrepair might not remain the ideal location for the SEC Championship, and everyone from the Superdome to open-air facilities across the Southeast would be lining up to host the game….Falcons officials might or might not care about the future of events like the SEC title game, but anyone involved with Atlanta government or sports management should.

Tony Barnhart said pretty much the same thing. If public money is going to be involved, and it clearly will be, then public interests have as much place at the table as Arthur Blank. If the need for a new stadium can be established, and even that’s suspect, it must be done in a way that will maintain, if not increase, Atlanta’s position in the market for sporting events. Yes, that means a retractable roof at the least. Otherwise, the GWCCA is just lining the pockets of its NFL owner while cutting the legs out from under a vibrant Atlanta sports industry.

To this day, you could probably still get a good debate going among Georgia basketball fans about Tubby Smith and his decision to leave for Kentucky. There’s the emotional reaction of betrayal of course. Others coolly accept that Kentucky was a better job, and leaving made perfect business and career sense for Smith. Still others maintain that the Georgia administration should have showed more fight to keep a talented coach instead of resigning themselves to the inevitable. Tubby’s legacy on the court is remembered more or less fondly (UT-C loss aside), but his departure still rubs many Georgia fans the wrong way. He is, after all, the first football or basketball coach to leave Georgia for a “better” job in, well, many decades?

There would be one way for Tubby to get Georgia fans to come together on this issue: take the job at Georgia Tech. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that:

Word is Georgia Tech could be interested in Gophers men’s basketball coach Tubby Smith after this season, when Smith will no longer have a payback penalty in his contract if he were to leave.

Of course we’re still at the unsourced rumor stage of things, and Tech still has a coach. The future of Paul Hewitt surely isn’t stable though, so it’s not premature to start thinking about potential replacements. The tidbit about Smith’s lack of a buyout is significant since Georgia Tech faces a significant cost to forcing out Hewitt. If they’re going to take a hit on their own buyout, it would be nice not to face such an expense on the other side of the deal.

I don’t put much more than a something-to-watch value on this rumor now, but it certainly would be interesting to see Tubby return to the state – this time at the head of the state’s second-best hoops program.

This is a headline we’ve been waiting to read for a while: NFL teams may replace playbooks with iPads. It’s not just showy hi-tech bling. The tablets can replace volumes of paper documents, make use of and integrate multimedia, and aid real-time decision making for coaches.

So why not college? When we talked about this a couple of years ago, the context was the end of the road for the aw-shucks coach who played dumb and could get away with pretending that he had no idea what this computer stuff was. Some didn’t even have to pretend. Coaches know now that they must understand, if not use, all of the technology available to them from cell phones to social networking. A few years ago it was just a competitive advantage; any coach not embracing this basic level of technology now should be replaced.

We’re already seeing the technology spreading into several areas of the Georgia program. The recent unveiling of Georgia’s Butts-Mehre expansion was an Apple fanboy’s dream. iPads became an important part of the recruiting process over the past year. The “Dream Team” pitch was bolstered by custom presentations and videos that made good use of the tablets.

It only makes sense that the technology should find its into game management and preparation. There’s no reason for Georgia’s state-of-the-art video technology to be constrained to the film room. Why shouldn’t a coach on the recruiting trail be able to fire up his tablet during some downtime and request to look at all plays run by the next opponent on 3rd and 7+? So much of recruiting is contact management. Did you remember a birthday, make the right number of contacts allowed by compliance, or meet all of the prospects from the high school you’re visiting? There are opportunities for technology there too. Of course this discussion isn’t limited to tablets – good old laptops and netbooks can work just fine in this environment. But forward-thinking programs can invest in custom applications to make full use of the tablet’s capabilities.

The next step logically is on to the field and in the boxes upstairs. Scouting reports, game plans, even the play menu could be replaced by a tablet and customized for each coach and staffer on the sideline.

Security remains a big issue – both in terms of the networks used to connect these devices and also the devices themselves. If “spying” on a guy making hand signals in front of tens of thousands of spectators is already taboo and a big deal, how scandalous would this kind of cyber-warfare be? We can even add fans to the mix now – whether it’s overriding your coach’s tablet to flash “GO FOR IT” or launching a denial of service attack to shut down a stadium’s network, the security concerns aren’t just limited to the other team.

One concern remains somewhat valid in the college game: “an onslaught of technology might give richer colleges a competitive advantage.” Few schools can put into place the kind of system Georgia just introduced. But certainly these larger programs already enjoy other advantages by virtue of the size of their budgets. Indoor facilities, state-of-the-art weight rooms and staff, access to aircraft for recruiting, academic resources – these are all things that larger programs can provide that many D-1 schools can’t. Those smaller programs struggle to operate much more than a baseline program, and even then it’s often done in the red. It’s true that adding rapid adoption of mobile technology to the list would only add to the burden of keeping up, but that list is already pages long. For smart smaller programs, the adoption of this technology could even be a cost-saving measure in both game preparation and recruiting.

Are you ready for the national holiday? I’m putting up these links to help me while I’m on the ground in Athens tomorrow, but hopefully some of you will find them useful too.

Official Word

Georgiadogs.com is expanding their Signing Day coverage again. 

• The official list of signings
• They’ll also have free video coverage hosted by Chuck Dowdle.

On the Web

• If you need a quick mobile-friendly list of signings, check this list from UGASports.com.
• Bernie’s Live Blog promises to be a fun way to follow the day.
• List of announcement times from UGASports.com ($)
• If you want national news, go to Rivals.com’s Signing Day Central.

On Twitter

We’ve been following NSD on Twitter for a couple of years now, and that won’t change tomorrow.  Most of our time will be spent checking these Twitter resources:

• Our UGASigningDay11 list follows many local and regional media and recruiting sites as well as Georgia’s official Twitter feed. Follow it as you would any Twitter user to pick up all of the flow.
• We’ll also give a plug to our own @dawgsonline account
• #nsd hashtag
• #dawgs hashtag

In anticipation of Signing Day, Rivals.com announces the Seantrel Henderson Rule for determining which school has the top class. (h/t Dr. Saturday)

The top team in the rankings, on signing day, will be announced later than usual and only those players that sign a National Letter of Intent (NLI) that day will count toward a team’s point totals. Players not signing, prior commitment or not, won’t be listed as commitments until they actually sign. Essentially the prospects listed as signing his NLI on the official school press release will be the ones counted on Feb. 2.

Everyone clear?

Of course the rankings announced on Wednesday will only be as reliable as a verbal commitment. “Just like every other year, we are aware that there are players who delay their decision to sign and we always update the team rankings following each of those decisions,” explains Rivals.com national recruiting analyst Mike Farrell. This policy will potentially affect where Georgia’s class is ranked. Defensive line prospect John Jenkins won’t announce his plans until next weekend. That’s OK, because there will yet another set of rankings months from now when we all care much less and after the nonqualifiers shake out.

As always, Rivals.com will recalculate and reissue the team recruiting rankings in August in the annual Enrolled Team Rankings, essentially ranking the classes based on which players actually enroll in school and show up on campus. This is, arguably, the most accurate ranking of all but doesn’t get nearly the same attention as the National Signing Day list.

Somehow the suits at ESPNU should be able to do something about that travesty.

The financial strength of Georgia’s football program and athletic department isn’t new news. It’s no surprise to see Forbes reveal Georgia as the SEC’s most profitable football program. As they note, Georgia’s profitability is only second to Texas nationally. That’s good news from a stewardship standpoint – financial strength gives you options, and there’s virtue in being frugal.

That would all be fine if we were shareholders and we were toasting this year’s earnings per share. But we’re not, and there’s no dividend check coming. Our dividends are paid out on the field. Profit of course is just revenue minus expenses. Georgia remains strong on the revenue side of things, second only to Alabama in SEC football revenue. But Georgia earns its most profitable status – over $8 million more in profit than second-place Florida – because they’re only seventh in the league in what they spend on football. As the article notes, “Georgia is only putting 25.8% of their football revenue back into the program.” That’s not entirely accurate: capital (long-term) projects, which probably aren’t included in annual expenses, are one way to reinvest, and the new Butts-Mehre expansion is a great start. Georgia and other SEC programs also have to rely on football to fund much of the rest of the athletic department, so you’re never going to see that reinvestment rate much above 40 or 50%. Still, other schools have to deal with these projects and issues as well, so Forbes asks an interesting question:

Can these 2009 numbers predict the future for Georgia? Take a look at the teams ahead of Georgia in terms of expenses (in the second chart above). In 2010, Georgia lost to every team they played who spent more than them in 2009: Florida, Arkansas and South Carolina.

Of course it’s not as simple as throwing more money around. Mississippi State has a pretty good program with under $10 million in expenses. Still, there’s an implication that Georgia could be doing more with its football revenue and reinvesting more of it back into the program. It’s one thing to be good and responsible stewards of the revenue brought in by football. It’s another for Georgia’s athletic department to have “more than twice the average profit” of the rest of the conference.

Oh, and no jokes about Auburn having the SEC’s second-highest football expenses.

Pryor rushes for 100+ and throws two TD passes.
Posey led the team with 3 catches, 70 yds, and 1 TD.
Herron scores Ohio State’s second touchdown, finishes with 87 yards.

And the game was wrapped up on an interception by Solomon Thomas, another suspended player. All that was missing was for Mike Adams to be the guy who fell on that fumble into the endzone.

It might be a little early for the Airing of Grievances, and this isn’t exactly “I got a lotta problems with you people” stuff.

“Pretty damn good”

This is probably a better post for the long off-season, but the short attention span summary of the 2010 Georgia season is quickly taking shape as a tale of Georgia righting the ship and recovering from a poor start and the absence of A.J. Green.

Mark Richt suggested that “we played pretty damn good” after the team’s 1-4 start. There’s no question that the 5-2 finish was better than the start of the season, and the team did play well in certain areas – primarily on offense as Aaron Murray developed at quarterback. The accomplishment of consecutive games with 30+ points is significant, but so is the point that 30 is just an arbitrary benchmark. If your offense is capable of scoring more and needs to do so in order to compete and win, 30 points is meaningless. We’ve heard plenty about the seven straight games with 30+ points scored. We’ve heard less about the Dawgs giving up 30+ in their last four games against FBS competition.

That 5-2 finish included a 3-2 SEC stretch. Above-average, but hardly what I’d call “pretty damn good,” and not up to the standards of what we’ve come to expect from a Mark Richt team. None of those wins were over a ranked team or anyone with more than six wins*, though there were three bowl-bound teams in there. Losing to Auburn was no shame this year, but there was a huge missed opportunity against a Florida team whose late-season dive was put on hold for one productive afternoon in Jacksonville. It’s to Georgia’s credit that they didn’t lose games to teams with similar records like Tennessee, Kentucky, or Georgia Tech, but that’s setting the bar pretty low.

I don’t take Richt’s quote to mean that he thinks everything is just fine. We’ve already seen changes with the strength program, he’s noted the need for a team that’s physically and mentally tougher, and he realizes that the defense has a ways to go.

I still don’t know that the team I saw down the stretch had improved to the point that I’d say the South Carolina, Arkansas, or even Mississippi State games would have turned out differently. Those teams improved a good deal themselves.

* Bowl game result pending

Pining for Muschamp

I caught this line from Mr. SEC in a post over at Get the Picture. The hiring of Will Muschamp at Florida might have the effect of tweaking more than one program, but I have my doubts that Muschamp coming to Florida really bothered Georgia fans all that much (other than the obvious: he’s still Florida’s coach, after all).

There are probably a lot of Georgia fans who are upset tonight. As a Georgia grad, Muschamp was viewed as a “someday” coach of the Bulldogs. You can bet the folks who wanted to blow out Richt and hire Muschamp this offseason are bummed.

Oh, I’ve seen some of what he’s talking about, but it’s nowhere near the reaction of “a lot” of Georgia fans. If anything, the typical reaction from what I’ve read seems to follow along these lines: first, mild amusement (as opposed to being “bummed”) that Florida turned, of all things, to a former Georgia player and, second, a small sense of excitement – even if misplaced – that Georgia won’t have to face Meyer or Mullen or Stoops in Jacksonville for the near future. Muschamp is (or was) a Bulldog in good standing whose progression from walk-on to starter to co-captain to rising coaching prospect is admirable, but let’s not pretend that this was a beloved icon like David Greene heading to a rival’s sideline. Most of us couldn’t pick him out of a team photo without a cheat sheet.

Frankly, I’ve found the whole Muschamp-as-prodigal-son meme to be much more a creation and fantasy of those outside the program rather than of those who follow the Bulldogs. It’s the same connect-the-dots logic that had Dan Mullen as the all-but-announced successor to Urban Meyer. Once you get to the small subset of fans ready to “blow out” Richt after this season, Muschamp was about as informed a choice as Gruden, Petrino, or any other name that usually comes up when fans play athletic director. If you anticipated that this offseason would include the firing of Mark Richt and the pursuit of Will Muschamp, you deserve to be bummed.

Florida is raising their home football ticket prices by $5 per game next year. The increase is expected to bring in over $3 million annually in additional revenue, and that should go a long way towards paying a new corch and his staff. They’d also like to get a little more money out of their trip to Jacksonville:

Ticket prices for the Florida-Georgia game will rise $10, if Georgia approves.

Anyone expect Georgia to put up much of a fight on that one?

Run-of-the-mill Florida tickets have been around $40 for a while, so an increase wouldn’t be completely outrageous. For context, Georgia fans can expect to pay at least $65-$160 for their other 2011 neutral-site game against Boise State if the LSU-UNC ticket prices were any indication.

The trouble with Florida is that it’s full of Gators. So why not go with a Bulldog?

Saturday evening news broke that the Gators had reached an agreement with Texas defensive coordinator and coach-in-waiting Will Muschamp to replace Urban Meyer who had resigned earlier in the week. The move brought two questions immediately to mind:

• Who, and how many, had to say "no" before the name Muschamp came up?
• Who’s going to be on the staff?

The first question is really only interesting from a process standpoint.  The assumption along with Meyer’s resignation was that Dan Mullen would be the starting point of Florida’s search. Any other names would be speculation – we don’t know that Florida spoke with anyone but Muschamp.  It’s also common sense that feelers were put out to many more coaches with more experience. Georgia also went with an assistant with no head coaching experience for their last hire, and it worked out pretty well. The transition from career assistant to top dawg Gator is something to which Mark Richt can relate.

The second question is more to the point of how successful Muschamp will be as a head coach.  The Chizik story at Auburn should remind us all that a superstar coordinator can make even the most questionable hire look like a brilliant decision.  Mark Richt’s choice of defensive coordinator was a huge part of the run that led to two SEC titles in Richt’s first five seasons. The composition of Muschamp’s staff is almost as interesting as the choice of the head coach himself. With the presumed expertise of Muschamp on defense and with the importance of a strong offense in modern college football, Muschamp’s picks for offensive coaches will naturally receive the most scrutiny. 

The choice of Muschamp’s offensive coordinator will also lead to a related question:  what’s the future of the Mullen/Meyer spread option at Florida? Some variant of the spread is commonplace enough in college football today that it wouldn’t be a surprise for the new coordinator to have a somewhat familiar scheme, but it’s not likely to be a direct analogue.  Florida struggled in 2010 with round pegs at quarterback in the square hole of their offensive scheme, and Muschamp’s new staff will have the work of untangling that problem and the rest of the roster tooled for Meyer’s offense.

Though the spotlight will be on his picks for offense, it would be wrong to ignore the importance of Muschamp’s defensive staff. Again we go back to Chizik at Auburn.  Chizik was the defensive mastermind behind the undefeated seasons at Auburn and Texas in 2004 and 2005, but no one would argue that defense is the strength of his current team. Florida had a long and stable run on defense under Charlie Strong, but that came to an end in 2010. Florida’s defensive players will be facing their third different system in three years in 2011.  Muschamp’s skill and experience will help him with that transition, but he’s going to have a lot more on his plate than worrying about the defense.

Minus the head coaching experience, Muschamp has a lot of traits you’d look for in an SEC coach.  He’s been part of several winning programs, has coached under some of the best men in the business, knows and has recruited the South, and he brings the requisite energy and passion for the game. Florida and the rest of us now get to find out if he’s head coaching material.

A December press conference about the future of the Florida football program? Brett Favre nods and approves.

It wasn’t Georgia’s best showing on either end of the court, but a 7-of-9 night behind the arc from junior point guard Dustin Ware gave the Dawgs just enough to secure a 73-72 win on the road at Georgia Tech Tuesday night.  Ware’s final three-pointer came with just 15 seconds left and broke a 70-70 tie, providing Georgia’s final points in a game that surprised no one by coming down to the wire.

A sluggish start meant that Georgia played catch-up for most of the night.  Travis Leslie spent most of the first half on the bench with two fouls, and the Bulldog inside game was generally ineffective early on.  Thompkins, Price, and Barnes combined for just eight first half points, leaving the guards – minus Leslie – to take up the load.  Ware and Robinson were up to the task, and Georgia reduced a double-digit deficit to a manageable six points at halftime.

Tech was able to keep Georgia at arms’ length for the first part of the second half, but the Dawgs finally drew even at 43 on a pair of Trey Thompkins free throws.  The sizable Georgia contingent had been pretty subdued to that point, but erasing Tech’s lead brought them to their feet.  Georgia soon went ahead for the first time on a pair of Sherrard Brantley three-pointers, and a 13-5 Bulldog run established a six-point Georgia lead inside of eight minutes left.

Georgia missed an opportunity to extend the lead to eight when a Price layup fell short, and a three-pointer on the other end got the hosts right back in the game.  Tech went on a late 10-0 run to turn a five-point Georgia lead into a 70-65 Yellow Jacket advantage as the Dawgs went cold on offense.  Thompkins picked Georgia up with a huge three-point play, and Ware’s final jumper with 15 seconds left capped an 8-0 run by the Bulldogs to win the game.  Tech had a final chance to win after Gerald Robinson missed two free throws, but a long pass was intercepted, and Georgia held on as the clock ran out.

It’s always great to beat Tech, but as I said it wasn’t a terribly good showing – it was much like the football game in that respect. Georgia’s a better team, and it would have been an upset to lose.  Despite having a stronger inside presence with Thompkins, Barnes, and Price, Georgia was outrebounded 43-30 and only had two more points in the paint.  Thompkins eventually heated up in the second half with 15 points in the final 20 minutes, but Barnes and Price never found much success on offense.  Another thing keeping Tech in the game was Georgia’s free throw shooting.  The Dawgs were a wretched 7-of-15 from the stripe, and Robinson’s missed pair at the end opened the door for Tech to win.

Neither team was especially strong on perimeter defense.  Georgia, led by Ware, shot an amazing 55% from behind the arc.  The Dogs were well over 50% from outside but only 44% overall and 46% from the free throw line.  Tech wasn’t much worse from outside at 40%. They cooled off though only hitting 33% of their three-pointers in the second half, and that helped to fuel Georgia’s comeback.

The win is Georgia’s second in Atlanta since the series left the Omni for the respective campuses in the 1995-1996 season.  Georgia’s last road victory against Tech came in 2000 when another Bulldog guard, D.A. Layne, dropped 28 points on the Yellow Jackets.  Meanwhile, Tech has yet to win in Athens since the series went home-and-home.  Thanks to those two road wins, Georgia enjoys a 10-6 advantage over Tech in the post-Omni era.

The Bulldogs are a respectable 6-2 now and will be off for the next ten days during exams.  Chances are good that the Dawgs will be at 11-2 when SEC play begins.  There are four winnable games in Athens during the latter half of December, and a December 23rd game at Mercer in Macon is the only road game left before the conference schedule.  

We’d rather have been a part of Championship Saturday, but staying home gave us the chance to see everything from Cammy Cam Juice to the always-entertaining arrest of a mascot. The regular season was ultimately anti-climatic, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to talk about.

• This is easy to say in hindsight, but Auburn faced their demons in Tuscaloosa, and I never had a doubt that they’d lose the SECCG. It reminded me of Georgia finally getting over the hump in 2002 at Auburn. It’s one thing to be a team of destiny, but it’s something else to see a good team hit its stride. Once Georgia managed that in 2002, Tech, Arkansas, and FSU never stood a chance. I don’t think Oregon will either.
• Cammy Cam Juice might’ve been the most ridiculous, and therefore the most enduring, moment of the 2010 SEC season.
• That said, the Gatorade bath is stale. Cam should have just made it rain on the sideline instead.
• This is the time of year when people gripe about there being too many bowls. They’re wrong. More college football is always the right answer.
• Congratulations to Willie Martinez: he’s now been a part of three conference championships and four BCS teams in the past ten years. When you recall that Martinez originally accepted a position at Stanford after leaving Georgia, he’s worked for not one but two teams bound for this season’s BCS.
• I think everyone was encouraged by the approach outlined by Coach T. late last week. We’re on to the “show me” stage rather quickly. The skepticism Tereshinski will have to overcome is this: was the decision to move forward with Tereshinski so obvious that it required no other interviews or a search of any kind? Georgia’s had some pretty high-profile strength coaches with Eric Fears back in the Donnan era and of course with Van Halenger. I hope Tereshinski is ready for his turn in the spotlight. Ben Dukes has some good additional perspective.
• Two teams from the state of Florida are ranked in the final coaches’ poll, and neither is Florida or Miami.
• Tech is offering Independence Bowl tickets for $14 to the first 5,000 purchasers. Does anyone else find that optimistic?
• Yes, UConn is going to get drilled in front of their 17 fans who make the cross-country trek. I’m glad though to see another school, much like Arkansas, get to experience a BCS bowl for the first time. It’ll be a great time for the fans who do go, and it’ll probably be the most-watched UConn football game ever. Outside of the championship game, the BCS has nothing to do with “best teams”. They won their (wretched) conference, and I hope they enjoy the reward.
• FSU never had much of a chance without Ponder, but Virginia Tech has to be wondering where they’d be now having scheduled Idaho State rather than Boise State. The pleasure of watching a team adjust and develop as the season goes on is one reason why I’m never sorry to see a team with a few early losses go deep in March Madness. It’s also why I wonder how many of the teams ranked ahead of Virginia Tech are really better than the Hokies right now.
• Newton and Auburn’s offense deserve all of the accolades thrown their way. You’ve started to see though an increasing role for Auburn’s defense in their success. They held Georgia to 10 points after the first quarter. Certainly they were adept at adjusting and not caving after Alabama jumped on them. Most impressive was their performance against South Carolina. We can debate whether the pressure put on an opponent by Auburn’s offense creates opportunities for the defense, and I’d agree that it does. Lattimore was limited, and it’s hard to stick with a ground game when you’re down by 14.
• Auburn’s Hail Mary had about the same effect that their onside kick against Georgia had. South Carolina had just scored to get within 7 and would open the second half with the ball. You can’t predict how things would have gone, but you can see an increased role for Lattimore in a closer game, and perhaps Auburn’s offense is kept off the field for a while longer. While we’re at it, is a squib kick ever a good idea? I understand the risks of kicking to the designated return man, but the rare long return seems like a small risk to take versus the field position you’re almost certain to give up. Does Auburn take a knee if they’re starting inside their own 30?

If you go by the ten teams mentioned in ESPN’s Gameday theme, you get a sense of what kind of year it’s been for the traditional powers in college football.  Only three of the ten are ranked, none of them in the top five, and the record of the others is a combined 45-39 with no team better than 7-5.

• Oklahoma: 10-2
• Alabama: 9-3
• Georgia: 6-6
• Florida: 7-5
• Ohio State: 11-1
• Notre Dame: 7-5
• USC: 7-5
• Michigan: 7-5
• Texas: 5-7
• Tennessee: 6-6

Well, we flew through Fort Worth…

Of course my headline yesterday was tongue-in-cheek – the Cam Newton investigation is far from over. His eligibility for the rest of the year is settled, but there are a number of unanswered questions.

I’m sure that the NCAA and SEC are aware of and alarmed by the enormous loophole this decision creates, and we should expect appropriate legislation Real Soon Now. But in the narrow scope of Newton’s eligibility, I don’t think the NCAA or SEC had any choice but to declare him eligible. Why? Because no evidence was revealed that Newton (or anyone, for that matter, ever received an improper benefit.

Reaction to the Newton decision has drawn a great deal of outrage, and I can understand why. Here you have an admission that a pay-for-play scheme was going on, and it (so far) has come to nothing. Some of the analysis has brought up the Reggie Bush and A.J. Green cases for points of comparison, but both of those cases have one thing that’s lacking so far in the Newton investigation: proof of an actual benefit (i.e., a transfer of money, access to property, etc.). The NCAA has established as fact that Cecil Newton had his hand out, but they didn’t indicate whether anything was put into it.

Whether Cecil Newton actually got anything for his effort seems to be the central question going forward (duh). That’s why we have the “based on the information available to the reinstatement staff at this time…” jargon from the NCAA. It’s not as if family members trying to get what they can out of the recruiting process is a new discovery – it’s a time-honored part of the recruiting process in most any intercollegiate sport. Just read The Blind Side and see what Sean Junior, a little kid, was asking for. Of course it wasn’t $200k or any amount of money, but a field and locker room pass is still a pretty sweet deal for a young boy. The “what can you do for me and my family” mentality is such an accepted part of the process that it’s comic relief in the Oher story. We rarely hear about the more serious requests for cash and other benefits because 1) most programs show those parents the door during the recruiting process and 2) there’s nothing solid to go by when the prospect signs somewhere else. That’s kind of where we are with Newton. The difference in this case is that the solicitation of money by a parent is now on the record.

Moving on, here are the two statements from the NCAA that I’m trying to reconcile. First:

According to facts of the case agreed upon by Auburn University and the NCAA enforcement staff, the student-athlete’s father and an owner of a scouting service worked together to actively market the student-athlete as a part of a pay-for-play scenario in return for Newton’s commitment to attend college and play football.

And…

Based on the information available to the reinstatement staff at this time, we do not have sufficient evidence that Cam Newton or anyone from Auburn was aware of this activity, which led to his reinstatement.

For that to be true, we have to believe that Cecil Newton was shopping his son (for allegedly six figures) to one program only: Mississippi State – the school with the smallest athletics budget in the SEC. If Cam didn’t attend MSU, it’s reasonable to think that MSU wasn’t willing to play ball. So, after being spurned by MSU, we have to believe that Cecil’s quest for a six-figure payday ended there and that nothing similar was ever mentioned or suggested to the Auburn staff. I wonder then how and when Auburn was presented with enough evidence to be able to agree on the facts of the case.

And this wasn’t just a case of covertly dealing with rogue boosters or those on the periphery of the Mississippi State program. The MSU staff was sufficiently aware of the scheme to report irregularities to the SEC office in January of 2010. Does Slive’s SEC office also have a role in this story? An alleged pay-for-play scheme landed on their desk in January. Because MSU was slow to provide additional information, the case sat until the NCAA became involved over the summer. Apparently Auburn was never made aware that one of their players was the center of a pay-for-play scheme, and it took until the final days of November for his eligibility to be in question. Do you think that would have been an important piece of information for Auburn to learn? The upshot is that Slive has turned this into not just an Auburn or Mississippi State problem but an SEC problem, and the rest of us are getting lumped into this farce.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the investigation, I think HeismanPundit is correct: this is hardly vindication for Newton. He’s cleared to play for the next two games before he takes his show to the next level, but that’s about it. The rumors about pay-for-play and shady recruiting are now established fact, and the historic seasons of Newton and Auburn have to live with that fact hanging over them even if further investigation can’t prove that Cam nor Auburn had a role.