By Hunt Palmer
Football coaches generally enjoy control over a room.
At the SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, the coaches team up to convey a united message. But sometimes it’s not heard when they step into the room next door.
“We think as football coaches that we live in a vacuum meaning whatever we decide in our room is gospel, and then we walked into the ADs room, and it don’t mean nothin’,” LSU head coach Brian Kelly said to Peter Burns, Chris Doering and Jacob Hester on Sirius/XM Radio. “You really have to think about it from two perspectives. As coaches, we’re thinking about progress. We’re thinking about transfer portal and getting it into the right window. We’re thinking about NIL and how we can get some clarity and some teeth to that. Then we’re thinking about revenue sharing and how we can get 85 or 105 on our roster. Then we walk in there, and they’re like, ‘look, we need revenue. We’re giving you guys $20 million. We need revenue.'”
The recent House settlement that allows colleges to share that $20 million with student-athletes has created an urgent push from administrators to find revenue. The most sensible place to find it is television
“The reality of it is, we’re the third most watched sport in the country. No. 1 is the NFL. No. 2 is the NBA, and No. 3 is SEC football. That’s major,” Kelly said. “People want to watch teams from the SEC play, and in particular play each other. So, it starts to put in perspective eight versus nine (conference games per season). It starts to put in perspective, ‘hey, do you play (College Football Playoff) play-in games?’ People want to watch the SEC play. And then we go back into our room, and we go, ‘how about we control what we can control?'”
Kelly told Burns, Doering and Hester that more meetings are going to have to take place. The coaches and athletic directors meeting twice to three times annually doesn’t allow for enough discussion as the winds of collegiate athletics shift month to month.
This week the aggressive search for revenue streams has dominated the conversation. The coaches, meanwhile, have other topics to share thought on, but they’ve been shoved to the back burner.
“There’s some important things coming up on the transfer portal window that we haven’t even gotten a chance to address yet,” Kelly said. “It will change everything if we don’t get that portal window in January. We would like one (window). We’ll live with what we have right now with a second (window) because there’s no SEC transferring in that second window. We would prefer one, and it needs to be in January.
“Think about it fiscally. You’ve got guys who want to leave in May, you’ve got them on payroll for three months, you might as well throw it out the window. We’re burning through money.”
The other hot topic has been the selection process for the College Football Playoff. An expanded playoff allowed for more teams and more revenue, but the coaches have their own thoughts on how the teams are selected and seeded.
One change has already been made, not just by the SEC. Teams will be seeded 1-12 instead of seeding the top four conference champions first.
The next piece is making sure the seeding process is done properly, and Kelly feels that strength of schedule was not factored in enough in the first edition of the 12-team field.
“Our concern with the committee is weighing your schedule,” Kelly said. “They look at just the right hand (loss) column and what that looks like. A loss is a loss. Not all losses are the same. I know nobody wants to talk about losses, but the truth is that losses are different, and I think that we would rather see a cleaner understanding of the process.
Kelly calls for more objective data to be considered.
“When I was at Notre Dame in 2012, we played Alabama for the national championship, that was a computer. Now we’ve moved too subjective. We need to move it back a little bit. Add some ratings. Bill Connelly’s got one. We can’t do an RPI, because we don’t have as many games (as basketball or baseball), but if we can do something that moves the selection process more in line, we’d be in good shape.”
