Oversigning and the Big Ten: Walking a Fine Line Between Hypocrisy and Reasonable Solutions

Oversigning. If you're reading this or any sports blog that has even a remote connection to college football, you've heard the word. It refers to the seemingly common practice of some schools and conferences to sign more players in a given recruiting class than there are scholarships available. As outlined in a recent Detroit News story, the most blatant perpetrators come from the Southeastern Conference.

Over the last 10 years, the SEC has averaged 25.2 signed recruits per season among its 12 institutions, according to statistics compiled by The Detroit News from data on Rivals.com.

25.2 per year might not sound like much, but consider the nature of the college football scholarship system. Each player, barring the uncommon sixth year of eligibility, has five years to play four seasons of college football. In 2011, Penn State will have scholarship players ranging from true freshmen to redshirt seniors (and even one likely candidate for a sixth year of eligibility in Pete Massaro). By the current count, Penn State has 87 scholarship players, a topic for a later debate, but transfers and injuries make the 85 scholarship limit easily within reach.

By contrast, with the 25.2 average, each SEC school has, on average, 126 scholarship players! Now we all know that's not true; none of these schools actually have 126 scholarship players. Early departure to the NFL, "medical hardships" and JUCO transfers cause that number to be slightly inflated. But you can see how averaging 25.2 scholarships per year can get a school into hot water quickly. That is, if the NCAA really did anything about these numbers.

Did Penn State oversign for 2011? Kinda.

Math. While it's a tough concept for those in SEC country, up here in the north it doesn't seem like all that much work to, you know, count. And that's all it took to figure out that Penn State appeared to have oversigned for the class of 2011 by two scholarships. But as I'll explain in this post, the Nittany Lions coaching staff did not, in fact, do anything outside of the Big Ten's oversigning regulations.