Before Mike Slive took the podium to open SEC's 2011 Football Media Days, word wiggled its way through the grapevine that he'd discuss what he sees as "meaningful change" in college football. After hearing what I just heard, I think it's safe to say just that - Slive really does hope for some significant change in college football, especially as it relates to recruiting.
Once we have his transcript available, we'll link it, but until now check out my notes (with some annotation) in bullet form:
- Slive wants to provide "full cost attendance" scholarships. For an Ole Miss student, that includes the cost of fried chicken, Keystone light, red polo shirts, fraternity dues, and BMW maintenance. Yes, if you follow the Twitters, that's the same joke I made five minutes ago. Deal with it.
- He's proposing multi-year scholarships, which is definitely a reaction to the cutting, grayshirting, and oversigning controversies. As it stands now, scholarships are one year "contracts" which must be renewed for each academic year.
- He'd like to raise the 2.0 core GPA requirement to a 2.5, which will either cause a lot of Jerrell Powes to enroll at Memphis and South Alabama or lead to mass grade inflation across the Southeast, if not both.
- He would like to bring back the acceptance of partial qualifiers, a common practice in NCAA 'crootin until, I dunno, fifteen years ago or so. Under this system, a guy who was "partially" qualified could enroll and practice, but not play, until his grades were in order.
- Showing a newfound acceptance of social media, he would prefer if outlets such as Facebook and Twitter were permissable recruiting tools.
- Slive would like to end the 7-on-7 type events which, as ATVS pointed out on Twitter, is becoming the AAU of college football.
- The SEC will begin to "seek to hold the historic approach to recruiting within the scholastic setting rather than through third parties and through handlers."
- Slive also proposed the reversal of the "bump rule" (the one that got Bruce Pearl fired, more or less) which doesn't permit coaches to "bump" into players at their high schools. A common practice in recruiting is to deliberately arrange to "accidentally" encounter a recruit in order to avoid possible recruiting violations. Slive things the rule against this likely creates more problems than it solves, something with which I am inclined to agree.
- He would like "intentional violations" as a new category of recruiting violations, which completely absolves Houston Nutt from any wrongdoing whatsoever.
- Slive stressed that his two most important goals would be to modernize recruiting and increace NCAA enforcement of existing rules.
Obviously not all of these thing are going to happen, and they're certainly not going to happen overnight, but we'd still like your thoughts on them, if you've got 'em.