Clemson Football: Coaches considering adjusting early signing period, ignore burning issues

Clemson football had a pretty good haul on early signing day, but this is college football so we can’t have nice things.

With seemingly bigger problems to solve, namely NIL scams and tampering, college football coaches opted to focus on the low-hanging fruit.

I’m fine with moving the early signing period moving to a different date, but believe the other items warrant immediate attention.  Call me crazy.

The house is burning and we’re worried we didn’t turn the lights out.

I’m reminded of working for a huge organization that was getting blasted by “headquarters” for not showing progress on several projects, so management decided we should focus on a few small, “looks good”, projects so the executives would “see progress” when nothing of any consequence was accomplished and resources were wasted.

Make no mistake, the early signing period will change, not because there is “energy” behind the idea, but rather because Greg Sankey no like it.

What Greg wants Greg gets.

Bigger problems will not be solved, because the powers that be don’t want them solved.  Those benefiting want the status quo and those who aren’t benefiting don’t have the power to get a change through the process.

"Those frustrations, Berry said, have largely been predictable, but the solutions remain difficult to find because of a strong disagreement about the vision for college athletics.“There’s no question that NIL, the transfer portal — anybody who’s surprised by this was being very naive, because conceptually this was going to end up a pay-for-play,” Berry said. “You’ve turned this into a professional model, and I’d still like to keep it an academic model. Maybe those worlds are going to collide. The moment all this stuff happened it was bound to collide. You can’t have both. I’d like to protect the academic model.”"

Ah, the academic model.  I brought this up a couple of weeks back.  No one cares about the college part of college athletics anymore.

A recent commit to Florida apparently hasn’t shown up because he’s “working through some things with Florida”.

Can anyone spell NIL?  Yet, there can be no inducement to attend with NIL, at least theoretically.  But Florida was specifically named in the tweet,  not the “Goofballs for Gators” collective.

This is what we call a clue.

I’m not naïve, I know how college sports have worked for a long time and realize that the college part of college athletics has been questionable for a long time at a lot of colleges and universities.

That doesn’t make it right or mean we should perpetuate it.

Adding money (for a few) and the ability to walk away because you had a bad day hasn’t solved all of the sports ills and one could argue it’s made them worse, while a few athletes at the top end of the sport have benefited greatly, the masses have suffered, namely the 1,000+ in the portal with nowhere to play.

To date Clemson football has been extremely selective in the portal

No one wants to address those that naively gave up a scholarship for the promise of greener pastures because they don’t matter, at least not to those obsessed with the portal and getting that wide receiver that’s “10 times better than what we have now”.

But don’t worry, THAT transfer is going to make it all OK and take us to the promised land.

Everybody’s doing it!

He can really spin it and as soon as we get the syndicate, uh, collective, to not offer him an inducement to attend good old State U we’ll be all set.