NCAA Dislikes Rumours, Becomes Stevie's Public Enemy 1

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Happy Friday, folks.

Wednesday marked Signing Day, traditionally the date on which players finally put “100% committed. Please respect my decision. No interviews. #AGTG #StriveForGreatness” to paper by signing their binding National Letter of Intent to their college of choice.

However, there were relatively few fireworks this year, a continuation of a trend which has been developing for the last few years as players increasingly sign during the Early Signing Period. Of the top 300 high school prospects according to most recruiting sites, more than 95% signed in December.

Meant to provide a select few, absolutely locked-in prospects with the opportunity to shut down their commitment and finalize their college plans a few months early, the date has quickly defaulted to becoming the primary signing period, with this week’s becoming the nicknamed late date.

Even so, the trend has really accelerated over the last couple of years. Another possible factor might be (you guessed it) NIL. As collectives attempt to allocate their financial resources to dozens of different recruits, they’re pressuring kids to make their decisions sooner or risk the school moving on (and reallocating NIL deals) to another prospect that might be willing to pull the trigger today.

I’ve already aired my disdain for where the Early Signing Period falls on the calendar. While there has been talk in coaching meetings about moving some of these key dates around, it doesn’t appear to be imminent. More likely to be moved than the ESD will be the transfer portal window which was introduced this offseason.

There was also a happy ending to the Jaden Rashada situation. Following the drama in The Swamp when he originally signed with Florida before the school’s collective reneged on an agreed-upon NIL deal, the California quarterback found a new home with Arizona State, the school where his dad played. Truly hoping for nothing but the best for the kid who was put in a really ugly situation.

While NIL is at the root of the Rashada drama, another of the feared effects of the rule might not be the cancer it was foretold to be. Namely, NIL isn't the locker room problem many forewarned of.

A recent study from Bill Carter of Student-Athlete Insights found that only 8% of athletes claim that NIL has caused issues in the locker room. It’s also not because teammates simply don’t discuss it as 76% claim that players share information on their NIL deals with the rest of the team. These sorts of insights help athletes to determine what terms are fair and which chicken joint gives the best freebies for Insta posts.

In fact, rather than causing division, we’ve seen dozens of cases where high-earning quarterbacks and receivers treated their offensive lines and teammates to watches, headphones, and gift cards.

I’ve always had problems with the team division arguments. Even before NIL, the star skill position players were already getting all of the attention and at least in the NFL, they were still the ones getting paid premium dollars. Introducing compensation to the equation was nothing new for the linemen who are used to the tough, anonymous work they do in the trenches.

All of you Hog Mollies up front, I see you. I appreciate you.

Finally, it was big news last week when the Pac-12 fired two execs when an audit found an undisclosed overpayment error. It seems that some Cajun analyst was too busy buying the beads for Mardis Gras as LSU suffered an accounting blunder of its own.

An independent audit found that the school accidentally overpaid HC Brian Kelly by more than $1 million last year by paying his monthly salary twice each month from May through November. I get that he beat Bama, but is the Tiger Faithful just pretending the Tennessee game never happened?!

The two sides slapped some duct tape on the situation, agreeing to an adjusted payment schedule for this year to get back on track with the 10-year, $95-million deal that lured him to Baton Rouge from sunny South Bend, Indiana.

Maybe try this with your boss and see if it works?

If you had taken the Chiefs - 2 before their game against the Bengals on Sunday, you were prolly sweeeeaty. Luckily, my guys over at Raising Stake have you covered for the Super Bowl and every other sports league as they bring you all of the must-read analysis on the sports betting industry. Check them out and subscribe with just a click of that button 👇️ 

Apparently, the NCAA is the only person not to like Rumours, causing an uproar from Fleetwood Mac fans and everyone else with ears to riot.

Wait, not the album?

Idc I still don’t like them.

The organization for sure didn’t enjoy seeing the Florida blown NIL deal all over the news for the past few weeks, though.

In fact, in a move running counter to the very principles the American judicial system is built upon, the NCAA has decided that when it comes to NIL violations, teams are guilty until proven innocent.

As of January 1 (okay, so not really in response to the Rashada thing but the timing is p fishy ), the league will be taking just about any 2 AM message board shitpost as evidence as it fights to reign in the recruiting monster it has unleashed.

Rather than continue to deal with witnesses withholding information or not coming forth about infractions, the league has decided to allow anonymous tips and news stories to serve as sufficient evidence to go after violators.

That literally means that if I someone just so happened to go after Miami some totally randomly named school on Twitter for offering a five star $100K to sign with the Hurricanes, the NCAA would consider it enough to investigate.

First one to tattle tale and use Pigskin Economics as a source gets a t-shirt.

In response, schools are actually forced to disprove the allegations, something which could prove much easier said than done. How exactly are they supposed to disprove some random accusation that SlicedBread posted on Reddit? This feels like Abigail Williams all over again…

The goal of the policy is to bring Mjölnir down on programs using NIL illegally (see: every one of them), and college football’s governing body is hoping this opening of the cage will allow it to do so.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that paying players to play is illegal considering how blatantly open teams are about these offers to high school recruits and transfers. In large part, it’s because it’s no secret that the NCAA has been Charmin soft when it comes to enforcement.

In announcing this new approach, officials claim that contrary to popular belief, they actually have opened up several investigations, though many of these have been slowed down by uncooperative witness and insubstantial evidence.

Now that these obstacles should be cleared, what would punishment look like for violations?

Luckily for the kids, the league has no plans to punish them for being 18 years old and having million dollar, life-changing offers being thrown their way.

Unfortunately, the NCAA doesn’t have any sort of power over the collectives making these offers, so that crosses them off the list.

That leaves us with the schools themselves to bear the burden, where punishment might involve significant fines and requirements of cutting off ties to third parties involved in violating the NIL rules.

To further signal its commitment to fighting NIL crime, the NCAA has also beefed up its woefully understaffed compliance and investigations departments. From under two dozen mall cops just months ago, the office is hiring a justice league of full time security and investigative experts to focus on NIL, many of whom come from legit backgrounds like the FBI.

Despite the bravado, I still have serious doubts about the efficacy of this policy, at least when it comes to stopping recruiting violations.

Every relevant program is bending the rules. Every school has a collective now. Players were being paid before NIL was a thing, and they’re paid a whole lot more now.

I don’t care about the morals you want to pretend your school has or how you don’t think your school would ever bend the knee to illegal recruiting tactics. We all believed in Santa, and all that ever did was leave us in tears when we walked in on our parents cussing as they tried to put together our new bikes at 2 am on Christmas morning. Just me? Oh.

The NCAA isn’t going to come after a school for using NIL to recruit because no coach is going to be so self-righteous as to come forward, and if a school did come forward to accuse one of the game’s biggest brands, what incentive does the league have to crack down on their golden children?

They don’t want to impose penalties on USC, Texas, or Ohio State. It would be bad for the game. It would be bad for the fans. It would be bad for the coaches that called it out as they’re blacklisted from every getting an offer to one of these elite programs.

If the league did decide to make an example out of one and go full SMU Death Penalty on one of the richer programs, don’t think for a second that it wouldn’t pull out the receipts and bring as many others down with it as it possibly could.

I’m not saying that what we have right now is good for the sport. This plan is just not the way to fix it.

There’s slightly more optimism for the waterboard that is transfer portal tampering. As shocking as this might seem, some of the kids that entered the portal and committed to another school 2000 miles away 3 hours later probably didn’t begin those conversations with that coach only after he entered the portal.

Dangling NIL deals in front of stars at other schools is a major issue, and in terms of having coaches actually come forward to report violations occurring in the NIL era, losing players that they’ve built an entire scheme around because they were offered more money by a bigger school a few states over in the middle of January would be a pretty big motivator for reporting.

Even so, I question what incentive the NCAA really has to punish an LSU or Oregon. Even as many fans claim to be done with the sport amid the professionalization and change occurring at every level, how many of them are still going to turn on the TV for the first game in August?

The NCAA might lose out on more money if they upset any entire SEC fanbase (outside of Vandy lol) by cracking down and issuing penalties to the for NIL violations than they would from the losing the few viewers who will actually stop watching CFB because they don’t like recent changes.

NIL violation enforcement is a fine line to be walking, and given the league’s rather subdued history, when it comes to the kindergarten, tattle-tale bonanza the league might be trying to induce, I’m going to have to feel the Chihuahua nip rather than trust its adorable little growl.

Cheers to another day,

Trey