Spurrier: Make Alabama sit out a year of recruiting for ‘fair’ SEC

The Southeastern Conference is sticking with an eight-game conference schedule to preserve crossover rivalries with the caveat that each team schedules one game against a team from one of the other power conferences.

This left LSU athletic director Joe alleva and Tigers head coach Les Miles upset at the “biased” voting and questioned the fairness in comments to The Advocate on Monday.

Naturally, South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Steve Spurrier had a few thoughts on the scheduling and had a suggestion on how the SEC could make things more fair for LSU and the rest of the conference in comments made to Alex Scarborough of ESPN.com.

"“There’s nothing fair about college football. You know that, don’t you?” he asked. “If it was fair, Alabama would have to sit out a year of recruiting. They’ve had the No. 1 class five out of six years. That’s like giving an NFL team the first five picks in the first and second round every year — almost.”"

Alabama is once again in line to have the top class for the sixth year in the last seven, so they blue-chip talent that is coming to Tuscaloosa isn’t slowing down any time soon so long as Nick Saban is in town, but could you imagine if SEC commissioner handicapped the Crimson Tide and limited them to signing a certain number of five-star recruits?

It would set just as big of a precedent as paying college athletes would.

Spurrier isn’t being 100 percent serious when he says this, but he is completely right when he says there’s nothing fair about college football. But then again, who ever said that it had to be?

Bigger programs like Alabama, Texas, Ohio State and USC have much more resources than every school in their conference and have a built-in advantage when it comes to attracting elite recruits, so it’s not “fair” for schools competing against this college football royalty.

Further, some schools have as many as eight home games a year while others are left with six and in an era where one loss can literally end your national championship aspirations, that is a huge advantage.