SEC Football – Trying to Legitimize by Capping Signing Limit

The Southeastern Football Conference represents a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

To the league’s fans, it represents a good old fashioned, laid back (or not so laid back depending on the amount of alcoholic beverages consumed, of course) time out in the sun cheering on young heroes with the kind of fervor that is especially strong considering the relative lack of professional sports teams.

To the NCAA athletic directors and presidents, it represents mostly dollar signs, as ticket and merchandise sales along with TV rights dollars continue to soar.
But to fans of other conferences and college football fans outside of the southeast, the SEC also represents everything that’s wrong with the sport.

The league has a long, colorful history of NCAA sanctions and violations against its teams and personifies the “win it all costs” and “if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying” attitudes that were side effects of the competitive arms race that unfolded among SEC fans in the past 3-4 decades.

One of the unfortunate side effects of this attitude in recent years was the tendency for SEC teams to over-sign players. Teams such as Ole Miss, who signed 37 players last year, simply held what amounted to informal tryouts for spots, giving them a big advantage over teams such as those in the Big Ten and Pac-10 who would sign between 20-25 most years.

Now, the SEC has placed a limit of 28 on signing day yields, a rule that should prevent kids from getting screwed out of chances to play football on the biggest stage and pursuing their education at an SEC school.

This is a ruling that was long overdue, the only question is why it wasn’t brought to light earlier in the media.

The Big Ten was the first school to impose a scholarship limit and their play seemingly has suffered on the field since then, but the league continued to take heat in the media since play on the field is all anyone seems to care about.

Now, there’s no question that the SEC will suffer without partial qualifiers and the ability to hand-pick extra players and send others packing with no backup plan except to go to places like Wofford and Appalachian State.

But considering that the southeast region has perhaps the deepest pool of talent of any region, the SEC will continue to be at or near the top of college football.

They just won’t dominate quite as much as they have in recent years. SEC football will still be special and the tailgate parties will still be without peer, but now, schools from other conferences will have a much better opportunity to compete.

Vanderbilt might even have a shot now. Consider what happened in 2007, when Auburn signed 30 kids and the Commodores, known for their academic prowess, signed only 14.

It could be a new era not just for SEC football but the college game in general.