Georgia coaches Mark Fox and Mark Richt expressed concern at the SEC spring meetings Tuesday that disparities among schools in cost-of-attendance stipends for athletes will become an unfair recruiting weapon that must be addressed.
“I think it’s a very significant issue — maybe as significant of an issue as we’ve seen in a long time,” said Fox, Georgia’s men’s basketball coach. “I think there’s got to be a way we, as a conference, can find some kind of level ground.”
“I think it’s not a good thing at all,” said Richt, Georgia’s football coach. “I don’t think it’s right that anybody should have that type of advantage or disadvantage, quite frankly.”
The SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 voted in January to pay stipends to athletes, starting this fall, to cover cost-of-living expenses not included in scholarships. The new rule caps the stipend at a school’s full cost of attendance beyond the tuition, fees, room, board and books covered in athletic scholarships. But because each school’s financial aid office calculates its own cost of attendance, the amount of allowable stipend varies sharply.
Within the SEC, the range is from $5,666 per year at Tennessee to $2,284 at Kentucky, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Georgia says its current figure is $3,221.
Once the numbers became known, coaches immediately expressed alarm that schools with higher figures could wield a recruiting advantage.
Richt and Fox said the SEC needs to deal with the situation in some way.
“There’s not enough transparency right now,” Fox said. “We don’t know how people are calculating it. You would think it would be more transparent than it is. That’s, I think, the first step: to say ‘OK, how is everybody doing it?’ Because if you leave a variable in that formula that you can dictate yourself, you’re just asking for problems.”
Said Richt: “I think there’s a lot of numbers out there that no one knows how they got to those numbers. It’d be nice to know how everybody gets to that number. That way, if everybody is using the same grid, then maybe it would be a little bit closer.”
Richt said he would like to see the amount of stipend standardized throughout the conference, but SEC commissioner-elect Greg Sankey indicated previous court rulings preclude that.
“There’s an understanding that it does create differentials, yet it’s all tied to the same set of expenses,” Sankey said. “There are litigation outcomes that dictate how we have to approach this.
“We initiated a transparency proposal nationally that was not adopted, but it was a close vote,” Sankey added. “I think there are motivations internally to see that same type of (transparency) approach even at the conference level.”
The issue will draw continued discussion as the meetings continue through the next three days.
