AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- For all of the hand-wringing about ballooning support staffs at football powerhouses such as Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Florida State, no one at this week’s ACC Spring Meetings seems to believe the NCAA is anywhere close to regulating those additional positions.
Earlier this week, CBS Sports reported the NCAA has conducted a survey to take a preliminary look at staff sizes across college football. It was said to be the first step in addressing what some coaches and administrators believe to be an unfair competitive advantage for the schools with the largest fan and donor bases.
Among the ACC’s coaches, Boston College’s Steve Addazio and Georgia Tech’s Paul Johnson have been vocal about the need for uniformity and restraint. But at the other end of the spectrum, coaches like Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher don’t think there’s a problem with letting schools invest as much as they want to invest.
“Everybody’s going to always argue, ‘Well, this team has more,’” Swinney told Warchant.com during a break in the spring meetings. “Well, that’s never going to be the same. Nike is never going to be the same as the mom-and-pop shoe shop -- even though they’re in the same business.
“There’s just more that comes with a 100,000-seat stadium versus a 30,000-seat stadium. There’s more money to spend, facilities, staffing … on and on and on. I don’t think that’s ever going to be a level playing field.”
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FSU athletics director Stan Wilcox is a new member of the NCAA’s Football Oversight Committee, which is expected to tackle the issue of support staffs in the near future. And like others, he pointed out that the first challenge will be trying to determine exactly how many staffers each school currently has in place.
That new NCAA survey, for example, has been shown to be off-base with many of its calculations. It listed Notre Dame as having the largest football operation in the country with 45 staffers, but other reports have shown that many of the schools' numbers were misrepresented.
“The devil’s in the details,” Wilcox said.
NCAA rules currently allow football teams to have nine on-field assistant coaches -- a 10th assistant will be added in January -- five strength coaches and four graduate assistants. What isn’t regulated is the number of off-field analysts, quality control assistants and recruiting staffers.
Florida State, for example, has eight quality control assistants, who perform functions such as breaking down film of opponents and helping with recruiting evaluations. Earlier this spring, the Seminoles added to that staff with the hiring of former quarterbacks coach Dameyune Craig, who had spent the past four seasons as an on-field assistant with Auburn and LSU.
Some schools have more staffers than FSU, while others have less, but Fisher said it’s difficult to know how to compare “apples to apples” because the job descriptions can vary from school to school.
“You have to define that,” he said. “What’s countable, what’s not countable. What that whole criteria is. … I think that’s where your whole discrepancy is.”
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Representatives from several schools -- including Clemson and Florida State -- said they’re not opposed to the NCAA looking at the issue.
“I’m sure it’s feasible,” Swinney said, when asked if there could be a way to regulate staff sizes. “Anything’s feasible. I think it’s worth taking a look at, for sure, and seeing if anything makes sense.”
But as much as they understand the concerns of the smaller schools and the programs with less money to spend, they also are quick to note that the larger programs shouldn’t necessarily be handcuffed by those limitations.
“If we have the resources, [we should] be able to use the resources,” Wilcox said.
While there were some differing opinions from a theoretical standpoint, no one interviewed this week by Warchant seemed to think there would be any easy or quick solutions.
Clemson athletics director Dan Radakovich said he actually joked with his staff on Tuesday that he’s heard the same issue being discussed for more than a decade. Back then, it was concerns about the growing number of strength and conditioning coaches being hired at some schools. Now, the attention is on other support staff positions.
“I was on the [NCAA] recruiting cabinet in 2007. It was a topic we talked about for two days,” Radakovich told Warchant. “It’s 2017, and we’re no closer to an answer. It’s a very, very difficult question because, again, it goes to the culture of the school and the commitment to various programs.
“There might be a one-size fits all, but it would be a big size.”
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