It's over. Mark Dantonio has retired, which is a bit of a bummer since I really could have used another couple years of beating the brakes off him while he brought in recruits snatched away from colleges I'm pretty sure aren't real. The timing of the latest salvos in the Curtis Blackwell lawsuit kind of look like the cause:

Blackwell's lawyers allege:

►Dantonio orchestrated employment for the parents of two MSU football players, with mega-donor Bob Skandalaris, whose name is on the football facility.

►Dantonio had Blackwell accompany him on a Metro Detroit home visit of an unnamed five-star recruit, when Blackwell, in his role as director of college advancement and performance, wasn't authorized to conduct off-campus visits.

Dantonio said in his Jan. 10 deposition that Blackwell never did any home visits because it would've been an NCAA violation. He did recall Blackwell once traveling with him to see a recruit, but that Blackwell remained in the car.

In his filing, Paterson said Blackwell "is prepared to provide the court with an affidavit attesting" to the visit of the five-star recruit, which can be "verified by the former five-star recruit and his parents, who were also present during the recruiting visit."

Paterson and Blackwell declined to provide the recruit's name to The Detroit News.

As for the first claim, Dantonio, in his Jan. 10 deposition, said he never directed Blackwell to talk to Skandalaris about employment for family members of "high profile recruits," but he acknowledged that family members were hired — and all were approved by MSU's compliance department, Dantonio said.

Although this might have been in the works for a while but Dantonio wanted to hang on so he could cash in a 4.3 million dollar bonus he was due a month ago. Just a couple month ago he was blathering on about "completing the circle", so I think Blackwell did it.

If not, well… tomorrow is signing day. If so that's the way Dantonio really should have gone out: collecting a reward by being disingenuous.

My dude just tweeted the typical statement about how he'll always be a part of the program, the program he loves so dearly, the program he just charged a cool $4.3 million to resign the day before Signing Day

lol https://t.co/WoMJrjiwXJ

— Jerry Hinnen (@JerryHinnen) February 4, 2020

Dantonio was a good football coach. He also had absolutely no scruples. It didn't matter if you pulled a gun on someone, broke a guy's jaw with a sucker punch, had a disturbing pattern of sexual assault, drove a car while "super drunk," or literally got out of jail two days before a game. Y'all were playing. A square jaw, a little public faith, and some wins over Michigan meant it didn't matter.

It was rough justice that Dantonio's breakthrough recruiting class would be his undoing when Auston Robertson, the guy with the pattern of sexual assault, reported three of his classmates for rape. It's really sad that MSU football had to dole out that much damage to innocent bystanders for anything to happen, and then it seems like the only reason it did happen is because football recruits finally refused to go there if they had any other options. MSU, the institution, continues to not give a shit about anything other than winning games and cover the administration's ass.

At least in this case the comeuppance was righteous.

[After the JUMP: money talks]

An issue for PSU. Defensive line coach Sean Spencer is headed to the NFL:

The Penn State football program faces another significant staff change and, for the first time this offseason, it's one that impacts things on defense. Sean Spencer, a longtime James Franklin assistant who followed the head coach to Happy Valley from Vanderbilt in 2014, is taking an NFL job with the New York Giants.

Spencer had been with Franklin since his Vanderbilt days and headed up a defensive line that was consistently very good. This is quite a list:

Spencer, who added the title of associate head coach in 2018, has helped Penn State produce several NFL defensive linemen, including a pair set to participate in the Super Bowl (Kevin Givens and defensive end Anthony Zettel of the San Francisco 49ers). Other past PSU pupils now at the pro level include Austin Johnson (Tennessee Titans) and Carl Nassib (Tampa Bay Buccaneers), while Nittany Lions junior defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos is a projected first-round pick in the 2020 draft.

This looks like a move similar to Campanile's, going from college to NFL position coach. Is the money that different now? You'd think that major college programs would be pretty close (pay the players). Or is recruiting that annoying these days?

Speaking of paying the players. Annual article about how dang much money conference X is raking in:

When Nick Saban and the Tide started their run, the SEC distributed $132.5 million to its league members. When SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announced Thursday that the conference had raked in $650.1 million in the 2018-19 fiscal year, it represented an increase of more than $500 million and a whopping $44.6 million per school. And that revenue number is about to soar even higher once the conference signs its next TV deal, which will create an even bigger gulf of resources between the SEC and every other FBS league that isn’t the Big Ten.

That is 520 million dollars annually that athletic departments now have to find a way to spend without giving any to the guys putting their health on the line to generate the vast majority of that income.

Free transfers en route? Most sports have a one-time free transfer rule. Only five do not, but they happen to be the five people care about most:

Athletes in only five sports are required to sit for a season when transferring: men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball, hockey and football. In the NCAA's 20 other sports, athletes are allowed a one-time. The difference in the two transfer policies is getting harder to rationalize.

The Big Ten has proposed getting rid of the sit out year in the five sports that have them. Manuel:

"We have five sports that are not allowed to transfer in this day and age. That is something we need to fix," Manuel said. "We need to give all young people flexibility to transfer once. If they transfer a second time, there is no waiver."

Since 65% of football transfers got a waiver last year it seems completely untenable to have the other 35% sit out because their grandma was 102 miles away instead of 99.

I do not recall this at all. A Joe Lunardi article on this year's bid-deficient ACC, which is tracking towards three bids, four tops, has a rundown of previous ignominious conference-wide basketball seasons. In it he trashes the Big Ten from two years ago:

We don't have to go back very far to remember the levels of abuse heaped upon the Pac-12 -- three of 12 teams (.250) in 2018 and 2019 -- or the SEC, three of 14 teams (.214) in 2014 and 2016. If and when the ACC gets its number back to four for this season, the resulting bid percentage of .267 will still lag behind the four-bid Big Ten of two years ago (.286), considered by many to be the worst season in major conference history.

Is it? I seriously doubt anyone has ever made this assertion before or will again. The Big Ten wasn't even close to the worst power conference that year! Per Kenpom the Big Ten was closer to being the best league in the country than it was being worse than the Pac 12:

The four teams that got in got seed of 2, 3, 3, and 5, with Michigan reaching the championship game. The Pac 12 had two teams lose in play-in games and saw Arizona—the only Pac-12 team to reach the opening weekend—get hamblasted by Buffalo in the first round.

That bullet point was going somewhere else. Before getting sidetracked by that odd assertion I was going to connect this article to the one about how the SEC and Big Ten have all the money. Lunardi references the bottom end of the ACC as an anchor:

The bottom of the conference -- Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Boston College and, until very recently, Pitt -- has become a serious drag on the middle. This year's Big Ten, for instance, has next to no bottom, so its bubble teams have exponentially more opportunities to build their NCAA résumés.

The coaches of those teams:

• Boston College: poached Ohio's coach after a couple years of okay MAC play and no bids. Before that he'd been awful in four years at TCU.
• Wake Forest: Hired Danny Manning after two years at Tulsa and still didn't can him after back to back 20 loss years.
• Georgia Tech: Hired Josh Pastner after he flamed out at Memphis once his remarkable recruiting turned out to be not on the up and up. Before that hired Brian Gregory coming off consecutive .500 A10 season at Dayton and 1 bid in seven years.
• Pitt: hired Jeff Capel from Duke's bench; Capel was last a head coach in 2011.

These coaches are barely qualified and with the exception of BC all three have decent recent history.

There are some of those in the Big Ten too (Richard Pitino) but Nebrasketball hired Fred Hoiberg. Illinois hired Brad Underwood away from another P5 school after one year. The idea that any Big Ten coach could get poached by anyone else is fanciful.

Mel is justifiably steamed. Mel Pearson is frustrated enough to go on the record after Johnny Beecher picked up a one game suspension after Saturday's OSU game. This scuffle somehow ended up with matching minors for Lockwood and Hein and a five minute major for Beecher:

pic.twitter.com/74BhEDtmgZ

— Michigan Daily Sports Video (@BlockMVideo) February 4, 2020

In the aftermath he's not mincing words:

“I just totally disagree with the call, on the record,” Pearson had said prior. “There’s just so many things going on in that play and if you play the game of hockey long enough, you understand everything that was going on there and the context of it.” …

“I’m all for player safety and that, but Will Lockwood was in a much tougher position than Johnny ever put any of their players in,” Pearson said. “ ... Will Lockwood was bent over the bench backward and two of their players actually had hands on him while 40 is punching him.”

Michigan ended up losing that game after spending most of the second period on the penalty kill; extremely frustrating way to lose when you need to make up a lot of ground to make the tournament.

Etc.: Run, don't walk, to this excellent Chris Fetter profile in the Athletic. A little bit more on the single wing play the Chiefs used in the Super Bowl that Seth covered earlier today. Mike Zordich in the mix for the Youngstown State head job. I enjoyed this bombing of Wisconsin. Kobe King on why he left. Shirtless 1970s Mel Pearson. Duncan Robinson gets praise for his… screens? One of the main guys in the FBI investigation of college sports is fully cooperating with the NCAA.