SEC must be careful not to follow path of old SWC

Sporting News, The, Feb 19, 2001 by Matt Hayes

As the story goes, the original deal was for $100,000 and two Ford Explorers. It grew to $200,000 cash. For one player. At another conference school across the way, the arms race hadn't reached such ridiculous proportions. Just $1,400 for a player and a couple hundred here and there for a few others. Down the interstate, another league school reported minor NCAA violations.

From cash payoffs to improper contact from coaches, the Southeastern Conference has covered it all lately. League coaches are bickering and complaining, and they have begun policing each other--turning each other in, in other words--for alleged recruiting violations.

Meanwhile, Fred Jacoby sits in the office of the commissioner at the headquarters of the Division II Lone Star Conference in Richardson, Texas, and marvels at it all.

"You have to understand," says Jacoby, former commissioner of the defunct Southwest Conference. "It can happen anywhere to any conference."

They were strong and invincible, the teams of the old SWC. A heavyweight conference full of tradition, titles, money, power and prestige. And a hell-bent lust for success the size of Texas.

There were intense rivalries and maniacal fans and All-Americans and first-round draft picks. There were big-name coaches with charismatic personalities. There also were cash payoffs and slush funds, with institutional control problems followed by NCAA probation. For SMU, there was the death penalty--the shutting down of the football program.

Sound familiar? It had better start sounding warning bells for the SEC. If the SWC, with all its power and storied history, can crumble under the weight of inner turmoil, the big, bad SEC can, too.

The SWC merged with the Big Eight after the 1995 season to form the Big 12. The off-field problems and probation were the impetus to it all.

"We were strong in every way," says Grant Teaff, the longtime Baylor coach and current executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. "But no conference is strong enough to withstand those problems."

Sound familiar? No conference can match the cache of the SEC, with its lucrative television contracts, overstuffed and oversized stadiums and unrivaled passion. Next year, the SEC will begin an exclusive contract with CBS in which every league game shown by the network will be a national telecast.

Yet there are numerous issues clouding the SEC's future. Although the current state of the league is nowhere near that of the SWC in its infamous heyday--seven of the league's nine members had NCAA problems at one point in the 1980s--there still are concerns.

One year after winning the SEC title, Alabama is in the middle of an NCAA investigation into an alleged $200,000 payoff for a prized recruit. Kentucky, which thrived under the fresh style of Hal Mumme before last season, is trudging through an NCAA investigation that forced Mumme's resignation.

The problems with the SWC and SEC revolve around the same thing: recruiting improprieties.

The SWC, which had eight schools in the state of Texas, eroded because all its teams recruited the same players. The SEC's 12 teams are spread across nine states, but the schools recruit the same players--and coaches. Georgia assistant coach Rodney Garner, generally considered one of the nation's best recruiters, has been on the staffs of Auburn, Tennessee and Georgia--all since the mid-1990s.

There's more money involved, there's more pressure to win and more coaches are taking chances. The SEC is stronger than ever on the surface. But underneath, commissioner Roy Kramer has gone from college football czar to traffic cop in his own conference.

"You think that you've got a grasp on these kind of things, but you really don't," says Joe Dean, the recently retired athletic director at LSU. "It's so disappointing. You open up the paper and see it happening time and again."

The question is, how many times is too many?

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