Another Rule Named After An SEC Coach

On Signing Day -- college football's annual orgy of name-signing and star-evaluating -- this year, Houston Nutt announced Ole Miss had signed an almost entirely fictional class of 37 players. The NCAA has a hard cap of 25 players per recruiting class, and a huge portion of the Rebels' class will be playing at junior colleges this fall. Nutt joked that there was "no rule we can't sign 80." 

Ah, but now there is. Nutt's gone the way of Nick Saban and Lane Kiffin, doing something to embarrassing extreme and getting his own rule: 

The SEC today passed conference legislation that will cap football signing classes at 28 players per year. The NCAA allows 25 players to enroll annually, but in the last three years more than half of the SEC schools have oversigned.

Huzzah for that. The SEC will take this legislation and attempt to make it a national policy. There's at least some shot it happens, as the Big Ten already adheres to an identical policy.

This is a step in the right direction. Oversigning to the degree that Nutt and others have over the past few years inevitably places the schools and players in uncertain situations, hoping that the exact right number of players get in so that they won't have to resort to roster hijinks like grayshirting or dubious medical scholarships or "suggesting" certain guys transfer.

I go back to this ugly assertion from a Bruce Feldman post in the wake of last year's oversignin' orgy:

One administrator I spoke with said schools also can make it so some player doesn't qualify if they don't need him to, which may sound surprising, but it probably shouldn't at this point.

The LOI program's intent is to provide a measure of sanity to the recruiting process: the school is locked into a promise to give a kid a scholarship and a kid is locked into that school. This sort of thing changes the power dynamic. The school can look at its needs once it has more data on its highly speculative class and then send players to JUCO, basically, when if they remained unsigned they could have found help to qualify elsewhere and avoided that.

That practice is not totally dead -- it's still viable if you've only got 15 scholarships, for instance -- but its most outlandish excesses are.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.