DESTIN, Fla. - Mark Richt entered SEC meetings hoping something could be done soon about the cost of attendance issue. He left the meetings Wednesday sounding resigned to there being no easy, or imminent, solution.
And that’s because the cost-of-attendance disparity is apparently here to stay, as the coaches were told by their commissioner.
“I think it’s a concern. But I don’t know if there’s any answers,” Richt said after emerging from a meeting between the football coaches and athletics directors. “When I say answers, any groundbreaking news that something’s gonna change from what we’ve heard. There’s nothing new, I think.”
Richt and Georgia men’s basketball coach Mark Fox have been fired up over the issue, concerned that it created a disadvantage for their school on the recruiting trail. Beginning on Aug. 1, schools will be able to pay athletes the cost-of-attendance at their school, and Georgia’s is at least $2,000 lower than several schools it competes with for recruits, including Tennessee and Auburn.
Alabama’s Nick Saban has also been publicly concerned about the potential for fraud or inequities.
But the SEC essentially told the coaches that there was nothing the SEC could do. The cost-of-attendance is determined by each school’s financial aid office, separate from athletics, and messing with the formula could run afoul of the Ed O’Bannon ruling.
Mike Slive, the outgoing SEC commissioner, said it was a short discussion.
“We understand that there are really compelling concern about how it affects recruiting. But we just tried to explain to them that this is something that … The judge in O’Bannon indicated that we were going to follow the federal rules, and it’s a financial aid issue, it’s not an athletic issue. It’s run by the financial aid office,” Slive said.
“There are differentials, and that’s a product of what I would call the vision for the 21st century. We’re putting student-athletes first.”
Tennessee coach Butch Jones, whose school computes a higher COA, downplayed any advantage he would have.
“First of all, we don’t control the formula,” Jones said. “Obviously that’s done on a much higher level. But I can tell you this: Not once in our recruiting conversations has cost-of-attendance come into play. I still think at the end of the day an individual is going to pick a school based on the relationship with the coach, the academic tradition that they have, opportunity to play early, area of the country, all those things.”
- Seth Emerson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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