August 4, 2016 v3 p42
I started blogging regularly about college football, U of M mostly, back in the fall of 2014. I still plan to write posts about my faith and fitness journeys but now it’s time to dedicate a weekly post to the reason I started this whole thing anyway.
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This offseason for college football has been nothing short of hectic. Jim Harbaugh has caused a whirlwind in the sport that no one has ever seen the likes of before. There are some coaches around the country who think what he is doing is great for the sport. Conversely there are a lot of coaches around the country who don’t like that he has returned to the college coaching ranks and gotten all of the attention without having proven much of anything. I believe there is an underlying issue with those coaches that they need to deal with.
The majority of those coaches come from the SEC conference. That conference has dominated NCAA football for the better part of the past 25 years. They are the whole reason the BCS existed in the first place. Through the late 90s it was the Big Ten that dominated the sport. As those schools started to struggle on the field against the schools from the south it became obvious that the balance of power was shifting. The Big Ten tried its hardest to hold on to its power by not joining the rest of the conferences to form what would eventually become the BCS. They somehow got the PAC 10 conference to agree to help them hold the “Granddaddy of them All” bowl game, The Rose Bowl, hostage and not allow it to become one of the games to rotate through the championship game. It took the 1997 National Championship being split between Michigan and Nebraska, and pressure from the NCAA due to the SEC threatening to break away and form its own league for the conference to change its mind.
This was the beginning of a long stretch were the SEC really did dominate the sport. It really showed how much power they had on and off the field. It was well deserved. The best players out of high school were going to the member schools in the conference. The weather in that region of the country allowed for them to best utilize all four seasons to prepare for the season. It’s hard to argue that they didn’t have it going on. Things seemed to be continuing to head in that direction and it didn’t look like much was going to change, until one of their own more or less defected to the north. When Urban Meyer came out of retirement and took the head coaching position at The Ohio State University it really made things turn in a new direction. I don’t think the SEC thought there was going to be any threat to their dominance.
The one single move of that head coaching hire really wasn’t a threat. But what it did do was take some of the focus off the SEC. Then in early December of 2014 Brady Hoke was fired as head coach of the Michigan football team. It took a little over three weeks to hire his replacement, Jim Harbaugh. I have never seen a coach come to a program with so much fanfare as Harbaugh did. Most of the fan base was anointing him as the savior of the football program, and ultimately the whole athletic department. The coverage this process received from ESPN was amazing. It was like how they cover the major market teams in professional sports, or wherever LeBron James is playing, because Cleveland isn’t a major market. You would have thought Harbaugh had won the National Championship that year and Michigan didn’t even have winning record that year. They lost to Maryland of all teams.
That still wasn’t what put the SEC in their place though. Urban Meyer took his Buckeye team to the very first college football playoff and thoroughly dominated both games they played in. With a third string quarterback. Against the powerhouse team of Alabama. It really put the whole nation on notice. Add in Michigan State’s last second comeback against Baylor in the Cotton Bowl with the home run coaching hire in Ann Arbor and it became pretty obvious that the power was shifting.
Coach Harbaugh certainly had an uphill battle in front of him to rebuild the program at Michigan. He really didn’t know what he had on his roster. He really didn’t know what type of recruits he had already committed to the school under Brady Hoke, and he had a team of players that knew nothing but losing on a regular basis. In the first summer Harbaugh set up numerous satellite camps around the country. This was a way for his program to get better exposure to kids who may not have the ability financially to get to Ann Arbor for a football camp. In turn, Michigan could get a better look at some players they may not have thought about before. I don’t think it was a coincidence that most of those camps were set up within the footprint of the SEC. Not because Harbaugh wanted to “stick it to” the conference, but because that really is where the most talent in the country is. Needless to say, the SEC didn’t think the same.
This past winter the SEC and the ACC conferences forced the issue with the NCAA. Initially they ruled in favor of those conferences and banned coaches from participating in campuses that aren’t held at facilities where the program normally holds practice. This essentially put a ban on satellite camps. Worst of all it hampered coaches from the smaller schools from collaborating with the coaches from major programs and learning how to be better coaches. It also put a handcuff on how high school students could be recruited. In all of the stories I read about that decision, the majority of them were on the side that the NCAA had made a mistake. The biggest glaring problem I heard was that some schools representatives were not voting at the conference level in the same manner their football programs wanted them to.
After about a month the NCAA reversed its decision to ban satellite camps. This was the first time I have ever seen someone stand up against the “mighty” SEC. I believe it shows that the NCAA realizes that it is on pretty thin ice as an organization. It is full of controversy and scandal throughout its history. I believe they have finally realized that college athletics would continue on if they didn’t start to make things right with the majority of their members. Unfortunately I feel that it’s because they don’t want to lose the TV revenue they generate from football and basketball. It has been a long time since the NCAA was all about supporting the “Student Athlete” and not the pocket books of some executive.
raymundjamesstadiumdotcom
While the NCAA is full of problems, college football it still my favorite sport. Be sure to check back here every Thursday as I begin to prognosticate on the season and lead into my weekly review of what I saw.
The Sporting Dad 