The SEC wrapped up its spring meetings Friday with commitments to keep eight-game league football schedules through 2015 and to push hard for stipends for college athletes.
No action was taken on a proposal advocated by outgoing University of Georgia president Michael Adams to create a conference-wide substance-abuse policy with consistent penalties from school to school.
On the football schedule — the most talked-about topic of the SEC’s week here — the league decided to maintain the status quo, including annual cross-division rivalries such as Georgia-Auburn, for at least three more seasons. But the league said it will spend the next year examining and deciding what the schedule should look like in 2016 and beyond.
That includes the possibilities of increasing to a nine-game league schedule, as advocated by Alabama coach Nick Saban, and/or eliminating fixed cross-division opponents, as advocated by LSU coach Les Miles.
“We’ll start to model immediately every option we can think of,” SEC commissioner Mike Slive said. “… It’s an important exercise because it’s hard to conceive of a schedule that will make everyone happy.”
Among the factors the league will consider, Slive said, is how the College Football Playoff selection committee will weigh strength of schedule in choosing its four-team field. The playoff begins with the 2014 season.
The SEC’s football coaches this week voted 13-1 in favor of eight-game schedules and were evenly divided on whether to keep fixed cross-division games. But several coaches and athletic directors said they suspect a nine-game schedule is inevitable at some point.
The coaches spoke clearly on the issue of stipends, which would give athletes spending money — “full cost of attendance” money in NCAA parlance — beyond the tuition, fees, books, room and board covered by their scholarships.
“Both the football and basketball coaches were unanimously in support of me pushing as hard as I possibly can” for the stipends, Slive said.
Stipends would require NCAA approval, and past efforts by the SEC and others to get that have been stymied. The NCAA Division I board of directors approved a measure in October 2011 to give colleges the option of providing $2,000 stipends, but the measure was put on hold several months later when many schools objected, most because of concerns about cost.
This week, SEC football coaches — long led on the issue by South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier — proposed annual stipends of about $4,000.
“The amount of money (football and basketball players) bring in is enormous,” Spurrier said, “and they need to share in it.”
The issue continues to cause tension within the NCAA membership.
“If we are unable to accomplish something that we think is important and really not that complicated in a reasonable period of time, then I think we should sit down and decide how we go forward,” Slive said. “I know there have been discussions by other people about another (NCAA) division, but whatever the mechanism, I think it’s very important that we let everybody in the Association know that this is an issue that really is not going to go away and we need to satisfy it.
“The conferences that are fortunate enough to have the wherewithal to help student-athletes need to have the ability to do that,” Slive said.
Adams had called on the SEC to “provide national leadership” by becoming the first conference to adopt a substance-abuse policy standardizing penalties across the league for athletes who test positive for drugs. Currently, individual schools decide on penalties, which vary significantly, potentially creating competitive disparities.
But Adams’ view on the issue was in the clear minority among SEC presidents and chancellors, and the matter was tabled, as it also had been at the league’s 2012 spring meetings.
“What we’ve been asked to do is to continue to be attentive to the policies in place on campus(es), and we will do that,” SEC executive associate commissioner Greg Sankey said. “We will look at the policies that exist and review those from time to time, and one of the requests is to make sure those are being applied in a consistent and appropriate manner. That’s our strategy at the present time.”
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