SEC Expansion Candidates

Matt Hinton has provided a more comprehensive treatment of expansion candidates here.

Dan Wetzel's advocacy for TCU stands alongside his irrational hatred of the BCS as knocks against him as a sports writer. I get that writers benefit from taking forceful controversial positions in public, but I would wager that TCU is so far from being on the table as an expansion candidate that they are effectively irrelevant.

Even ignoring that reality, do they make sense in a vacuum? They are a borderline candidate at best. They are a small private school that happens to have had a good run in football. They don't fit the profile of an SEC school. Their stadium has only 50,000 seats after a significant expansion. Only Vanderbilt has a smaller football stadium in the SEC. Every SEC school has a larger student body than TCU, and most of them are more than twice as large. Most of their football success is recent. Between 1960 and 1998 they only went to 3 bowl games.

West Virginia, on the other hand, is a public flagship university with great tradition in football and basketball, but they may already be out of the picture. If that's the case, and if no ACC schools are willing to leave their conference, the SEC has limited choices for its 14th member and the chances of an interim era with 13 members increases.

As the article suggests, Missouri is still out there, but their departure might prevent a deal to save the Big 12. Would they pull the trigger on that? They certainly appear to covet SEC membership as a golden ticket to future relevance, and as an opportunity that they may not ever see again, but if they leave the Big 12 and all hell breaks loose, they will take some of the blame.

It's Official: Texas A&M will join the SEC

The search is now on for the 14th member. If reports of the remaining 9 Big 12 members handcuffing themselves together are true, Missouri is off the table and armageddon might be averted. It's looking increasingly like Florida State would be the only ACC team to consider an invitation to the SEC. That takes Virginia Tech, NC State, and even Maryland off the table. Add Clemson and WVU to FSU and you have a list of 3 solid candidates that could be plugged into the SEC-E to create two seven team divisions.

Keep in mind that the Big 10 played with 11 teams for several years, so it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the SEC would go with 13 teams for a year or more rather than take a sub-optimal expansion candidate.

West Virginia Makes a Lot of Sense for the SEC

Spencer Hall makes the argument more colorfully than I can, but the culture argument for adding WVU to the SEC resonates with me. They are a good basketball school, are almost certainly available, and would be a good fit with the SEC. The have that same chip on their shoulder as a small state that many SEC schools share. Despite not being a marquee academic name they are still the flagship school in their state and that counts for something. They fit the profile.

Missouri, on the other hand, is a midwestern school in a pro sports state. They are not the biggest thing in any media market except perhaps for their immediate vicinity. Academically they bring a lot to the table, and are a large flagship school. Not a bad addition, but the Big 10 passed on them for a reason, and they passed on them for a more football crazed school from a smaller state. The SEC should do the same.

More on "Inevitable Superconferences" - The Pac 12 stands pat

SI is reporting today that the Pac 12 has decided not to expand in the current round. I like the idea of giving the current twelve team structure some time to jell. It takes a lot of time for new additions to really feel like a part of the conference and for meaningful rivalries to develop. I am an Arkansas fan and there are still people in the fan base who long for the Southwest Conference days. Actual paid sports writers have speculated that Arkansas might leave the SEC to join the Big 12. Arkansas, it should be noted, has been in the SEC for a mere twenty years.

I'm not sure how much of this is driven by the Pac 12's voting structure. At least when it had 10 members, expansion required a unanimous vote. This argument was used against the inclusion of BYU, a very conservative religious school likely to raise objections from Stanford and Berkeley. I assume they still have a unanimous voting requirement and it is quite likely that at least one member objected to expanding beyond 12 teams.

Notably this also works against reports that have identified Missouri as the SEC's next expansion target. If the Big 12 can hold onto its current 9 members and quickly add a 10th, it could very well survive and Missouri would have no need to move. Call this Scenario 1.

Scenario 2 sees Oklahoma as still desiring to leave the conference, and with the Pac 12 off the table the SEC is a strong option. The Big 12 implodes, current members find homes where they can, and the remnants probably merge with the Big East.

Thoughts on LSU vs. Mississippi State

LSU's defense is the big story from this game. MSU has a pretty good offense, and it was absolutely stumped.

The tone was set with the first or one of the first plays of the game, when MSU ran a simple option play which was quickly snuffed out. Having only seen the play once, my guess is that they were in a cover zero or cover 1 look and had a man assigned to both the QB and the pitch man. I didn't see MSU run another conventional pitch option play during the game.

It really felt like watching an NFL defense. They were able to consistently make Relf wrong on zone read plays. Again, this is based on a single viewing, so I cannot say whether it was a matter of a superior athlete at end or tackle playing both Relf and the RB, or whether it was a schematic thing where the defense assigned a player to both runners. In theory the zone read always works when the QB makes the correct read, but the play was so unsuccessful against MSU that I wondered why they continued running it. Like an NFL defense, the LSU Tigers did not (usually) allow MSU to get away with slow developing running plays or sweeps to the outside.

And through all of this, MSU had some lucky moments on third downs. It could have been even worse. Even after three games it is difficult to accurately describe MSU's quality. They played perhaps the worst D1 team in Memphis in the first week and gave up 14 points and over 300 yards of total offense, not all in garbage time. Then they go on the road and lose to the defending national champs, and follow that up with a loss at home to an apparently legitimate top 5 team after a short week. I'd like to see them play a lower tier SEC team right now just to see if they struggle or not.

The ugly part of the game was MSU's blatant surrender at the end of the game. They were never more than two scored behind. Victory was unlikely, but you don't just quit when you have 3 timeouts and are only down 10. Auburn would never do that. LSU would never do that. There are many reasons why MSU is a perennial cellar dweller in the SEC West, and this sort of attitude is one of them. I expect Mullen to move on to greener pastures sooner rather than later, but if he can't be bothered to fight to the final whistle while coaching a ranked SEC team, why would any other school bother to hire him away? Is that the kind of coach you want on your sideline? Don't get me wrong, Mullen has done a lot of good things there and is a terrific coach, but this is to me a significant black mark.

The Shame of College Sports

The Atlantic has posted a voluminous article about the NCAA and college athletics. Though long, it is required reading on the topic. If it looks too long, read half of it. Read a quarter of it if you must, but do read some of it.

Suffice it to say, many of the present problems with college athletics predate the modern era of huge television contracts.

I have long been opposed to paying players, and this article tests that belief. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I think it is impossible to pay the players while keeping a college sports world that resembles the current one. There are major legal and institutional issues that make paying players within the current framework extremely complicated. The article highlights some of those issues that even I had not considered when it comes to athletes collectively negotiating with their schools to determine which players get what salary.

One solution would be to regress and embrace true amateurism: get rid of athletic scholarships, get the big money out of college athletics, and turn college football into glorified intramurals. Another solution would be to convert the college football programs into bona fide for profit businesses, either completely independent or under the organizational umbrella of their university.

Finally, I want to point out another elephant in the room: tax exempt status. For athletic departments, losing their tax exemption is a huge obstacle to major reform. If the athletic departments morph from their current state into true, for-profit club teams then they are likely to lose their tax exemption.

Changing the NBA Draft to Favor Weak Teams

Zach Lowe at the excellent Point Forward blog has some discussion of proposals to alter the NBA draft to give an even greater advantage to weaker teams. I don't like most of the proposals. Each of the 30 teams should get one of the first 30 picks. It's only fair, and as he notes few players outside even the first 10 or 15 picks become superstars. The first 5-10 picks are by far the most important part of the draft, and the draft lottery already allocates those picks to teams that missed the playoffs.