Silver Bullet… um… BB Points

Quick hits from Friday/Saturday AM

Buckeye News

• The players named in the SI Article met with the NCAA yesterday, and feels that there’s nothing for the student athletes to be worried about–

“There is no scintilla of evidence related to 90 percent of those kids listed in the Sports Illustrated article that they did anything wrong,” James said. “That’s the way it’s going to turn out, I believe. It’s just irresponsible reporting.”

• In addition, the owner of one of the tattoo parlors mentioned in SI’s story says that the allegations regarding his former establishment are not true; and is backed up in this by at least one former employee.

NCAA News

• The University of North Carolina expects to get their Notice of Allegations from the NCAA in June, stemming from the issues that surfaced last summer.  This says two things to me; either UNC’s situation is really significant and it’s taken a long time to root it out, or Ohio State has done a great job at working with the NCAA to address the issue (discovered in January/NOA a few months later).
• The big news yesterday was the SEC’s decision to change their recruiting guidelines. First, the good- Medical exemptions will be reviewed at the conference level (say goodbye to Dr. Saban’s practice). Also, transfers of graduate students will not be allowed if they only have one year of elligibility remaining (No more Jeremiah Masoli to Mississippi situations). Finally, they’ve opened the door for a “national conversation” rather than just a “conference by conference”.  More on this in a bit.
  
• And now, the bad- The conference voted to reduce the “signing cap” from 28 to 25. While this was hailed as big news, the fact of the matter is that a team with only 10 available scholarships shouldn’t be able to sign 25 student athletes- as our friends at Oversigning.com point out. Huge kudos to their work- it’s only because of media pressure that this is even being discussed.
• Jeff Shultz from the Atlanta Journal Constitution agrees that the SEC’s “decision” is mostly just PR:

Let me translate: Coaches now have a lower limit as to how unethical and morally reprehensible they can be. Feel better? This was sort of like the real SEC passing a rule: “We recognize that insider trading is a problem. So we’re going to cap profits from said illegal transactions at $2.7 million.”

• And for your daily dose of arrogance:

“So I’m very pleased that the league is where it is today, and I’m proud of the step we’ve taken really in a leadership role nationally to deal with this bigger concept of roster management.”

Actually, the leadership role in this was taken in 1956, when the Big Ten banned signing more recruits than a team had openings for. Fifty five years ago.