Signing Day - hindsight - NIL & "Pay for Play" - is anything illegal?

Cheeseburgers.  Cheeseburgers are illegal.

Yep. It's hard not to say/think that the only institution under scrutiny is Michigan.

Really makes ya warm and fuzzy toward the conference and the NCAA.

You aren’t accounting for the unknown unknowns.

which is probably something like big bags of cash certain schools pay to the NCAA to avoid scrutiny

corruption is not a flaw, it’s a feature!

If Michigan does it, it's probably illegal.  

Yes.

Yet, it's amazing this is rarely discussed instead of cheeseburgers and signs.

It really does seem like the only rule is that every school other than Michigan can do whatever the F it wants.  

buying cheeseburgers, apparently.

This conversation will probably be deemed a level 1 violation.

Apparently, not exactly recalling one short meal at your favorite lunch spot (that you've been to a zillion times in your life) that you bought for two already committed recruits who dropped by unannounced during one of the weirdest most unusual times in US history is the only crime the NCAA cares about.

Stretching while eating cheeseburgers = DEATH PENALTY

How does one write in to the Joel Klatt show for mailbag questions? I'd love to ask:

"Joel, in your signing day show, you went on and on encouraging signing inducements. But they are technically illegal and much more impactful than advance scouting. As you yourself said, they are changing the balance of power in all of college football.

How can you encourage the one rule-breaking, when you insisted so strenuously for weeks that Michigan has broken a rule (that you yourself implied was a silly rule) and should be punished?

I know that you were even-handed enough that you took a lot of heat for supposedly defending Michigan. But doesn't integrity require you to insist just as strenusouly that all of these inducement-offering programs should be punished?"

Pay for play is what it is - it’s not going away (and always was there to an extent anyway).  It’s sort of like yelling at the clouds at this point.

One thing that interests me with the new Big Ten - among the schools with the most resources, I think you’ll have Ohio State, USC and Oregon on one side and Penn State, Michigan and Washington on the other.  The former schools playing the pay for play and NIL games to a significantly larger extent than the latter.

(Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, MSU, UCLA - more likely to be in the latter group, if only because their potential monetary resource pool is smaller)

Michigan has won the conference 3 times running now, so obviously schools from the latter group can still reach the top of the mountain.  But it is a more challenging uphill climb, no doubt about that.

There’s only one rule:

Whatever Michigan does, it’s illegal, an affront to the sanctity of college football, an affront to America and all that is good and true, and you can bet your bottom dollar the NCAA will be the vanguard of justice for Michigan’s victims and bring the hammer.

And that’s largely because Michigan chooses to be one of the few remaining institutions that gives the NCAA any semblance of deference and credibility. 

The NCAA won’t enforce any of it because frankly they are afraid. They don’t want to be taken to court and lose more power. They will enforce violations that don’t regard athlete earnings

There are no rules, and I suspect everyone is afraid to try to codify things for three reasons: (1) lawsuits; (2) no matter what's written down, it won't cover everything; and (3) if you close a loophole, the money will just flow underground like it was before.  The NCAA will try to maintain an appearance of authority by punishing schools they think will allow it, but the handwriting is on the wall: within a decade the NCAA will be gone, and a super-conference with its own ruling body will be in force.