You can argue over Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive’s vision for the future of major college athletics, and many no doubt will in the days, weeks and months to come.
But no one can ever call Slive passive. Especially not after his opening remarks at the start of the SEC’s annual media days Wednesday.
Seemingly surrounded by more and more public relations problems, Slive took the offensive as if Steve Spurrier were calling the plays.
He stole the thunder of academia by asking that the NCAA strongly consider raising the high school cumulative GPA needed to participate for a college freshman from 2.0 to 2.5 on core classes. On the other hand, he satisfied his 12 member schools — or at least everyone but Vanderbilt — by pushing for partial qualifiers to obtain eligibility as college sophomores if they satisfied certain academic standards as freshmen.
He threw a Clifford-sized bone to his league coaches by attacking certain recruiting rules, especially the “bump” rule, which was arguably the final straw in his friend Bruce Pearl’s ouster as Tennessee’s basketball coach. Along those same lines, he also called for less strict standards on social media contacts, since it probably can’t be enforced anyway.