Kirby Smart’s SEC secession talk is just the beginning of the ugliness
By David Wasson
Published:
This is going to get ugly.
There’s no other way for the current, fracturing state of college football to go. Not when you have one of the highest-paid and most decorated active coaches saying the quiet part out loud.
This is going to get ugly.
It is bound to happen, a nasty turn for the worse after seeming eons of uneasy alliances. Not with this kind of money on the line, not with the near-total lack of rules – either in place or being followed.
This is going to get ugly.
A civil war is brewing in college football, and it may very well envelop all of intercollegiate athletics before peace is found. Don’t believe me? Here is a direct quote from Athens, Georgia, resident Kirby Paul Smart whilst on a working vacation in Miramar Beach, Florida:
I’ve been a huge advocate that if we can’t find rules that everybody plays by, then we should play our own. I’m not afraid of that. I’m not afraid to break away and say that our conference is strong enough to go out and play.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your secession.
That Smart, the 2-time national championship coach at Georgia, might be thinking about the Southeastern Conference breaking away from the NCAA to compete on its own – up to and including its own postseason competition – is one thing. Even for Smart to contemplate it with his fellow SEC coaches behind closed doors at the Hilton SanDestin Resort during the league’s annual Spring Meetings is OK.
But for Smart to sidle up to a reporter’s audio recorder and say what he said… well… it is darn near unprecedented.
The nexus of Smart’s – and one can only assume the SEC’s – theoretical stance on breaking away from the rest of the country is multi-fold. For starters, commissioner Greg Sankey has been steadfast in what has rapidly become a minority opinion that the College Football Playoff should not expand beyond 16 teams.
That the SEC is willing to hold its collective breath until it turns blue in opposition to doubling the current 12-team CFP into a 24-team battle royale is one thing. And Sankey has done everything but attach a clothespin to his nose at the notion that the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame are all on board about.
But CFP expansion isn’t the only thing Smart presumably is sour about, oh no. The SEC continues to find itself on the losing end of the free-for-all that is spiraling NIL spending and the requisite tidal wave of NCAA investigations and other litigation that comes with it. The College Sports Commission has largely been toothless in trying to enforce whatever rules came out of the House settlement. Which means the proverbial Pandora’s Box of moolah got opened for players without maximum security prison-level walls in place to keep some sort of order restored meant we were bound to end up where we are with NIL.
In a follow-up to his secession banger, Smart made it clear that he is not against players earning NIL-related money – only that schools and boosters are quickly accelerating toward an unsustainable level of NIL spending without an end in sight.
“I’m not advocating that they make less money. I’m fine with what student-athletes make,” Smart said. “I’m trying to make it where it’s as equal and it’s comparable footing for everybody and it’s not a race to the bottom, as they say.”
Smart’s comments at the SEC Spring Meetings came on the heels of Georgia president Jere Morehead saying recently that if federal legislation isn’t enacted to curb what he’s called “anarchy” in the sport, he and Georgia are prepared to “be ready to vote on creating an SEC mechanism and SEC rules. That’s what we have to do.”
“I think that would be fantastic,” Morehead added. “I can’t imagine the ratings if that happened. Georgia-Alabama SEC championship last year had ratings through the roof. Imagine if that had been for the national championship? I think our fanbase is strong across the country. I think we’d have tremendous interest in a situation of that nature. But, again, I’m going to be listening to the commissioner.”
Ah yes, the commissioner. So far, Sankey has only rattled the chains about the CFP expansion being no bueno for the SEC without adding the “if that happens, then…” portion onto it the way Smart ever-so-helpfully did. Perhaps that is by design, too, a sort of Georgia trial balloon to test how a breakaway SEC would fare with the general public.
If that is the case, we might have caught a glimpse of it earlier this week in the form of Iowa State AD Jamie Pollard, who offered this gem:
Let them break away. We should break away from them. Let them go, but they have to go in all their sports and see how fun it is to play baseball, softball and track when it’s just the 20 of you. That’s what I think we should do, but I’m one person & that’s probably a little more draconian.
That’s how I feel about it. Like, let’s quit talking about it. Quit threatening. Go do it. But if you’re going to do it, you don’t get to just do it in football and then keep all your other sports with us. No, take them all. See how fun it is.
Them’s fighting words, without doubt, and fit neatly into the textbook definition of what is rapidly brewing into a civil war. Whether you side with Smart’s beliefs or with Pollard’s pushback, there is one point we can all certainly agree on.
This is going to get ugly.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
