Delvon Roe & The Fine Print of NCAA Bylaws

Yesterday, a fire burned hot, tall and bright to allow Delvon Roe to suit up for the final home game against OSU this weekend. He'd be conferred all Senior Day privileges of kissing the S, helping box out Jared Sullenger and that hilarious hug between Tom Izzo and a dude 11 inches taller than him. Immediately, Roe threw water on the fire tweeting:"Lol I love my followers u all r great. It's not about me lets worry about wrappin up this big10 title OUTRIGHT!!N let the NCAA do there job." Hollis later got out the fancy china to have a talk with us over twitter about the NCAA's non-involvement in the decision for Delvon not to play.

One of two things REALLY happened here. A decision for Delvon not to play was reached by Izzo, Hollis and Roe and no NCAA waiver was requested. This is possible, the decision for Delvon to leave basketball didn't appear to be easy, he might just not want to reopen old wounds or a host of many other reasons(loss of focus on the game, sacrificing a valuable Roe minute in what will be a tightly contested game, etc).

OR

Izzo loves his kids, Hollis is a showman, I won't call him a PT Barnum of Athletic Directors, but the thought crossed my mind. If Roe is trying to get into acting and isn't a showman, he best think his career choice through. The NCAA said, "No, but we're gonna say no like when you try to hire a head coach and they say no. There's no offer and thus no refusal." We're going to say no because we're the Extraordinary League of No Fun it would contravene our bylaws.

So which bylaw would he be violating?

Luckily, the NCAA provides a summary of it's Regulations right there on the internets. I'll save you the trouble and just quote liberally since the NCAA should have no problem making it's policy on Student-Athlete Participation, clear, right? Riiiiiight.

Ethical Conduct - It's not salient, but clause A made me laugh out loud.

a.) You must act with honesty and sportsmanship at all times so that you represent the honor and dignity of fair play and the generally recognized high standards associated with wholesome competitive sports. [NCAA Bylaw 10.01.1

I have no idea what kind of Orwellian jackass wrote clause A, but he/she/they/aliens should be flogged publicly with a whip of nine tails as a complimentary theraputic healing activity to promote wholesomeness of the soul and the self. Also, unless Delvon Roe's Hobbled Knee is actually the name of his Speakeasy, he's in the clear here.

Amateurism – All Sports.

a. You are not eligible for participation in a sport if you have ever

(1) Taken pay, or the promise of pay, for competing in that sport. [Bylaw 12.1.2]

(2) Agreed (orally or in writing) to compete in professional athletics in that sport.
Exception: Prior to collegiate enrollment, in sports other than men's ice hockey and skiing, you agreed to compete on a professional team provided the agreement did not provide for more than actual and necessary expenses and you did not receive more than actual and necessary expenses. [Bylaws 12.1.2 and 12.2.5.1]

(3) Played on any professional athletics team as defined by the NCAA in that sport.
Exception: Prior to enrollment, in sports other than men's ice hockey and skiing, you competed on a professional team provided you did not receive more than actual and necessary expenses. [Bylaws 12.1.2 and 12.2.3.2.1]

(4) Used your athletics skill for pay in any form in that sport. [Bylaws 12.1.2 and 12.1.2.4]

Exceptions:

(a) Prior to collegiate enrollment, you accepted prize money based on place finish or performance in an open athletics event from the sponsor of the event and the amount of prize money did not exceed your actual and necessary expenses to participate in the event; or [Bylaws 12.1.2 and 12.1.2.4.1]

(b) After collegiate enrollment, you accepted prize money based on place finish or performance outside your sport's playing and practice season and during the summer vacation period in an open athletics event from the sponsor of the event and the amount of prize money did not exceed your actual and necessary expenses to participate in the event. [Bylaws 12.1.2 and 12.1.2.4.2]

b. You are not eligible in a sport if you ever have accepted money, transportation or other benefits from an agent or agreed to have an agent market your athletics ability or reputation in that sport. [Bylaw 12.3.1]

c. You are not eligible in any sport if, after you become a student-athlete, you accept any pay for promoting a commercial product or service or allow your name or picture to be used for promoting a commercial product or service. [Bylaws 12.5.2.1 and 12.5.2.2]

d. You are not eligible in any sport if, because of your athletics ability, you were paid for work you did not perform, were paid at a rate higher than the going rate or were paid for the value an employer placed on your reputation, fame or personal following. [Bylaw 12.4]

Well there it is, in section c. Roe has been auditioning for gigs and has even been in a movie called AWOL. He's represented or does work for the Okemos Talent Agency(that annual trip to the mall was good for something!). An argument could be made for or against d. as a higher rate of pay but I think it would be inconclusive either way. An argument could probably also be made for b. NOT THAT (b).  but it seems to apply to athletic agents as opposed to Big Fancy Movie Star Agents.

The Russell Wilson/Brandon Weeden/Drew Henson Argument

So why was it cool for these guys to play Pro Baseball and then be college QB's in the fall? They accepted their money as professional baseball players so they were eligible to play College Football. So if Delvon Roe had left college and become a Professional Competitive Eater or a Professional Golfer, it'd be cool for him to suit up on Saturday.

A One-Day Retirement Clause

It's too late for this and won't help Delvon Roe for Sunday, but would it really be such an awful idea to have a One-Day Retirement Clause? All of the professional sports are allowed to sign guys to one day contracts so they can retire as a member of "their team". In just the list above, there are two exceptions to six rules, would it really be so unwieldy to add a One-Day Only Retirement Clause? Update 3/2 9:34AM: The idea being allow the person to dress with the team, warm-up, be a player in every sense except actually playing the game. This was implied, but it was late when I finished the post and I think it needs to be spelled out. After all, this isn't corporate tax law or anything.

As far as Delvon goes, don't feel sorry for him. Delvon Roe is a great kid who seems to have found acting makes him happy. There are worse fates to befall someone than realizing your original goal was really just a waypoint to a different path. Hell, some of us should be so lucky as that. While there might be a sting for him not playing Sunday, he has a whole career of proud memories to look back on as a Spartan. He's welcome home anytime he likes.

A Thank You Note To Mark Hollis

In 2000, I served as a member of MSU's RHA. As such, I attended many meetings to combat problems like student binge drinking at tailgates(Might as well have tackled world peace). At one of these meetings, Clarence Underwood attended. He walked in quietly and sat down next to me. He wore a name tag, after all in 2000 they had just invented the internet and so he wasn't instantly recognizable. He struck up a conversation with me and so I eventually asked him the question on my mind.

"When is MSU going to play Florida State?"

Allow me to take this chance to remind you, I hadn't followed football at all until fifteen months prior. So I had no idea about Nebraska coming in here and blowing the doors off of MSU a few years earlier, etc.

He laughed politely and even more politely said, "Never son. We're not ever going to have Florida State come here." We talked some more about things not sports related after that, sat through an excruciating meeting about I can't remember what and parted as friends.

---

Were it 2010 when I was a whippersnapper in student government and I had bumped into Mark Hollis I suspect that conversation would have gone a little differently. I'd have said "When is MSU going to play Florida State?" Mark Hollis would have said, "Florida State? Why would you want to play them? Let's play LSU, in India, while being cheered on by a pack of wild tigers."

After a weekend like this one, with victories at Ohio State in basketball and a very well played split with Michigan. It feels important to say thank you to Mark. While I haven't seen eye-to-eye with him on every subject (it's starting to feel very difficult to bring my kids to a football game sir) the places he is taking Michigan State are very special.

To use football as an example(this is primarily a football blog after all), he's scheduling quality opponents. MSU plays Boise State, West Virginia, Alabama and Miami of Florida in the next ten years at Spartan Stadium. Three of those four have won BCS bowl games since the beginning of 2010. All the while, he's renewed our more or less lifetime contract with Notre Dame until the robot revolution occurs and is firmly in place.

On top of giving students and alumni the games they want to shell out their money for he's made coaching hires that win games. Hollis and Izzo hired Dantonio back in late 2006 to replace John L Smith. Dantonio has already tied for a Big Ten Championship in 2010 and was a blocked punt away from repeating in 2011. Hollis and Izzo hired Suzy Merchant and she went on to win the Big Ten title last year. Jake Boss Jr. was hired in 2008 by Hollis and won the Big Ten title in baseball in 2011. Tom Anastos was hired in 2011 after a long stint as the CCHA commissioner, many outside of the MSU circles laughed at the hire. Anastos is 6-2-1 against the top 10 this year in a year that was meant to be a rebuilding year. If you're a newly hired coach at MSU, you have a GREAT chance to succeed here.

He also kept the patron saint of MSU sports here. I cannot state strongly enough how flustered it seemed like Tom Izzo was back in 2004.  Yet, when Dan Gilbert came and backed the money truck up to the Izzo residence in 2010, Tom's good friend Mark Hollis helped provide Tom the space, time and probably dollars needed for Izzo to declare himself a lifer in East Lansing.

I'm as excited about watching MSU sports as I have been in years. It's the coaches who are winning the games on the court, on the field, on the ice, on the playing surface of their sports choice. It is important to stop and say thank you to Mark Hollis and his staff for adding winning without destroying cupcakes only.

Back to sports. Who's next?

Michigan State Fans These Days Don’t Know What They’re In For

I was in jail.

Michigan State University police station, actually, waiting for a transfer to Ingham County Jail. I had let a fix-it ticket for my Honda’s busted exhaust turn into an actual ticket while saving up for a new exhaust, and then the old exhaust fell off completely while driving downtown which drew the attention of the local constabulary and it turns out I had a warrant from the unpaid ticket and . . . yeah.

This was in the Hazy Period of my life. I was as done as I was going to get with college but hadn’t yet bothered to spin the numbered wheel of The Game of LIFE or add people-pegs to my little plastic car. I was taking stock of that decision, or lack thereof, when a fresh-faced lad sporting a blue cardigan and khakis was seated next to me.

I asked him what he was in for. “Rioting,” he said.

I asked him what in the hell he’d been rioting for.

“I . . . I don’t know,” he said. “I’m from Connecticut. I thought  . . . that’s just what we do here.”

* * *

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the student sections at Michigan State. The Izzone is bigger than ever, packing the lower (and part of the upper) bowl, but instead of making the Breslin an impenetrable fortress of intimidation the Izzone picks their spots. They make noise, sure, but they save themselves for big games and big situations.

The southeast corner of Spartan Stadium doesn’t fill up anymore, despite MSU not losing at home since October 2009. Think about that: this fall’s class of Michigan State juniors have never witnessed Michigan State lose at football, yet AD Mark Hollis is openly considering shrinking the student section.

The students are passing up no opportunity to add salty words to their chants, because ha ha why not? FIRST DOWN, BITCH! That’s clever and funny! As Jim mentioned earlier, they also have no problem wheeling out the “Little Sister” chant to against Michigan, because apparently being a girl is worse than being a boy. Besides, we can’t be each other’s little siblings. If students are going to be sexist idiots, they should at least make sense and call Michigan “Big Sister.”

What’s wrong with kids these days?

Part of it, as Hollis said, is cultural. His twelve-year-old doesn’t ever “sit down for two hours and do anything.” But if college kids can’t pay attention to their football or basketball team establishing itself at the top end of national awesomeness, then we might as well give up on humanity now because nobody will ever pay attention to anything ever again.

Part of it is a trend across all sports: going to a game used to be the ultimate populist spectacle. Entering Spartan Stadium meant joining a seething mass of humanity, the lower bowl a cauldron filled by the bloodthirsty hoi polloi. Now, sporting events are more like joining a fancy club with steep dues. The kind of people who go to games are the kind of people who can afford to drop hundreds, or thousands, on tickets and concessions and apparel—and frankly, those people are less likely to stand up and holler from kickoff to gun.

Those are also the kind of people who can afford to send their kid to Michigan State. Tuition keeps going up, and every year the percentage of (highly profitable) out-of-state and international students grows. More and more kids from Connecticut are showing up expecting nonstop multi-sport Spartan domination . . . and nobody screams their lungs out with joy when they get what they expect.

I don’t mean to suggest that students who aren’t from Michigan can’t be Real Spartans. In my experience, how green your blood is depends entirely on how green your heart is—what Michigan State means to you personally.

But of my Spartan friends, many are legacies; their parents moved from wherever to the Lansing area and stayed here. Coming to Michigan State meant establishing themselves as independent adults—and the potential to reach a standard of living much higher than they were raised in. In turn, they taught us to be Spartans and hate Michigan and all that good stuff. When my eldest child started school, I found to my delight kids still display partisanship by chanting, “Michigan, State! Michigan, State!” and jabbing a thumb down (or up), then up (or down) in time with the words, just as I did when I was a kid.

For me, the success of Michigan State athletics, and the rivalry between the two schools, was expressed constantly around me in the home and at school and at church . . . it absorbed the entire community. Nick Saban’s last season here, the amazing 9-2 Citrus Bowl year, seemed as close to glory as Michigan State was ever going to get. Crowds packed Spartan Stadium to the brim, and the team started calling their home “The Woodshed” because they almost never lost there.

Now they actually never lose there.

When I see current MSU students from parts unknown on Twitter with “Proud future Chicagoan” in their bio, it makes me wonder. Coming from money elsewhere, heading for money elsewhere, stopping here to party in between . . .  how much can Spartan triumph possibly mean? Who cares about taking pride or being classy when they can just show up drunk and have fun and leave halfway through to go drink? Or, hey better yet, just leave the paid-for ticket in their pocket and keep playing another few hours of flip cup?

For this generation of Spartan students, going to a top bowl game or beating Michigan or going to a Final Four isn’t a jumping-up-and-down screaming, fandom-defining moment, it’s just what we do here.

* * *

The final part of it rests squarely on the shoulders of the power brokers in college sports. Mark Hollis, Jim Delany, and the NCAA as a whole, I’m looking at you. How can students think football games are special when they don’t mean anything? How can you expect thousands of college kids to show up and scream their brains out as Michigan State puts it in cruise control against FAU or Chicago State for the umpteenth time?

When I rant and rave about “diluting the product,” this is what I mean. College athletics has stretched itself to the breaking point. Universities and conferences are desperately trying to board the TV money train while their arm is shackled to the boring old concrete pylon that is a century of amateur college athletic tradition. That money train is pulling away, and either they need to let it roll away, or break out of their college handcuffs once and for all.

The Week in Review for Jan 12, 2012

So last week after the Outback/Arnett/Worthy/Narduzzi/Baker drama, I had wished for some quiet time in MSU sports. That is exactly what happened, and now begins the long hard winter of recruiting and that's pretty much it until Spring Ball. Basketball coverage to be spotty, as I've said many times before, The Only Colors does a much better job. The Week in Review will be a staple during the football lean times until we begin quenching our thirst for football roundabout August.

Johnny Adams

Johnny Adams tweeted to some very happy Spartan fans, "Back in East Lansing for my senior year!!!!!". You can tell he's excited about this because there are five exclamation points at the end. He also wears the number 5. He only had 3 picks this year, maybe next year he gets...5?

Johnny Adams might have saved himself from another five by staying. This five is the fifth round, which is about as high as I could see him being taken at this point. Best of luck to him in the upcoming year, I forsee him bolstering his draft position with a healthy 2012.

Fran Is Real Mad About Something, Maybe Being Named Fran?

Image courtesy of Sports From a Spartan

Fran McCaffery got SUHper pissed and threw a chair in Iowa's loss at Michigan State on Tuesday night. Iowa's 95-61 demolition felt like a throwback to the early 2000's. Indeed, the last time MSU recorded fifteen straight wins was the 2000-2001 season. This was I'm sure in part aided, by Tom's mild rebuke of the Izzone after the old folks showed them how it's done over the holidays.

This rebuke came after a bit of a row about how the Izzone is too involved with their phone during the games and not involved enough with the game. So Hollis celebrated this rebuke, by texting during the game on Tuesday night. Also, why rebuke them prior to the Iowa game. Shouldn't that have been saved for a good opponent?

Speaking of Hollis, You Should Know

Are you a wealthy alumni who has money to spend on going to interestingly located sporting events? No? Are you wealthy? No? Hm. Do you love Michigan State and know someone who is wealthy? Maybe? Ok, then we're finally getting somewhere. There have been more solid rumors recently of a MSU vs. (THAT) USC Basketball game in Greece and a hockey game on an aircraft carrier.

I love what Mark Hollis is doing right now. Make no mistake about it, the recent increased success of MSU Women's Hoops and Football is due in part to Hollis' incredible effort to market and be a champion of Michigan State sports. All while being the lowest paid athletic director of public record in the Big Ten.The man has done and will continue to do great things for Michigan State Athletics. Do you sense a but coming? You should.

I can't say I agree with all of these gimmick games though. Don't get me wrong, they're amazing, increase visibility for the school, attract potential recruits, etc. The athletic department turns a profit, so I shouldn't complain. However, for my own part, don't oversqueeze your fans, students and alumni to support these once-in-a-lifetime events that could start to happen every year. Have these events often enough that they are a part of the MSU brand, but not so often they aren't a once-in-a-lifetime event anymore.

MSU Hockey

At Munn Arena an amazing thing has happened. Michigan State's very own version of Rich Rodriguez has been exorcised in Rick Comley and replaced by Tom Anastos. For a brief backstory, when Anastos was hired the non-MSU blogger consensus was that Hollis had given up on hockey and that if you wanted to talk hockey, you best go find Ron Mason at the Blue Gill Grill on a Saturday night.

All he's done since coming to MSU is knock off three teams in the top 20 and field an 11-9-2 squad. MSU is coming off a three game skid and looks to get their swerve back against #20 Northern this weekend. I've not yet made it out to a hockey game yet this year, but I think it's going to be a must before the season is out. He has the Spartans ranked 18th and is positioning hockey to improve itself the same way Football has under Dantonio.

Other MSU Bullets

• Nick Hill wants you to know he's a Spartan for life. Photo courtesy of Chris Vannini's Green Thoughts. I'm pretty sure that sets the record for most manly tattoo on the Spartan football team ever.
• MSU Wrestling takes on West Virginia and Indiana this weekend in the hopes of getting back above .500
• Women's hoops plays on Sunday afternoon and looks to continue their undefeated big ten season. After their 67-47 win tonight, they are 4-0 in the early Big Ten Season and could improve to 5-0 with a win against Ohio State on Sunday.