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.