Satellite camps have a friend in Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney.
Delaney spoke to the Detroit Free Press at the Big Ten offices Wednesday, and offered his support to Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh and other proponents of the satellite camp movement.
“The rules are the rules,” Delany said … “There’s nothing that Jim has done, that (Alabama’s) Nick Saban has done or any other coach, that is in violation of the rule. I would agree with (Michigan State’s) Mark Dantonio: It’s creative. It’s an area that has been used before, is being used now and, to the extent it is modified, it ought to get modified through a comprehensive study of recruitment practices.”
Delaney remained mum during the brief ban on satellite camps on April 8 to the rescinding of the ban on April 28. However, he and the Big Ten as a whole opposed the proposed ban on satellite camps from the ACC and SEC. He said he wanted camps to be reviewed alongside the entire recruiting process — not singled out as a separate issue.
“I’ve become much more familiar with how those rules have evolved,” he said. “I do think there needs to be a national method in recruitment that absorbs the interest of the student so they can be seen by and learn about programs, whether it’s Boise State or whether it’s Michigan or whether it’s Alabama. What is the exact proportionality of how satellite camps, institutional camps and perhaps regional camps, whether developed by the NCAA or the American Football Coaches, and how they all fit together is a mosaic. If there is a comprehensive review, there will probably be some fences around that.”
Delaney also had a few interesting thoughts on the changes to replay reviews by the SEC. The conference announced earlier this week it was planning to introduce a central office for replay reviews for its games. Instead of consolidating the review process, Delaney is confident the few replay issues that do exist could be mitigated by introducing tablet technology that would connect sidelines to replay officials.
“We think the calls on the field are pretty good and the replay by and large is pretty good,” said Delany, whose conference was the first to experiment with replay in 2003.
He noted there were 17,000 plays last year and about 200 were reviewed with 35% overturned. Of those only 8-10 where he thought “the standard was misapplied.”
He didn’t think a centralized location isn’t necessary for those 8-to-10.
