The circus comes to town today

Another day, another college football big name linked to a possible agent issue. This time's it's Alabama's Marcel Dareus, who was voted to the coaches All-SEC first team announced earlier in the day, being linked to the big South Beach shindig. In response, Nick Saban offered a spectacularly inane suggestion on how to fix the problem: colleges should banish the NFL from their campuses. That would do nothing to reduce kids desires to go pro and make big money as soon as possible, but it would make it much more difficult for teams to accurately evaluate talent. As a result, guys who have no business going pro would be even more likely to do so thanks to getting their info from people with agendas flattering them or the Todd Mcshays of the world. Saban doesn't seem to get that the guys involved in the Reggie Bush fiasco weren't agents. They were wannabes who thought Bush could be their cash cow, but they weren't even registered with the NFLPA. How would banning NFL teams from getting game films have done anything to stop that or something similar happening in the future? Considering Saban hypes his NFL connections and ability to develop players for the pros all the time, this is a completely hypocritical thing for him to have said. That's not surprising, but it is annoying. We'll see what more Saban says about the situation this afternoon.

Everyone knew that USC was going to make a change at its AD spot, but the replacement for Mike Garrett will still surprise some people. Pat Haden, known to dislike Garrett's style of conducting business, gets the job beginning in August. We'll see how he handles the hiring and firing, but Haden is a respected college broadcaster and has a solid background. USC also has appointed a Vice President of compliance, believed to be the highest ranking person in that position at any school in the country. The university is planning to give back its copy of Reggie Bush's Heisman Trophy to the trust which presented it. Considering they still are keeping O.J.'s Heisman, it's safe to say the standard for Trojan legends is pretty low but Bush still fell short of it. For his part, Bush failed to turn up for a scheduled online chat with his remaining fans last night. Probably just a coincidence.

When no one will pay you to do something anymore, does that mean you're retired or unemployed? Tyrone Willingham likes the sound of choice number one better, and says he will not coach again. After the way things went for him with Washington, I could have told him that. Willingham got a raw deal at Notre Dame, where he was given only three years while every other coach before and since has fulfilled at least his original five year contract. That said, Willingham was an awful coach. He has one conference title out of eleven years in the Pac-10, and won just one of five bowl games. There was nothing in his resume that should have gotten him a job better than his initial head coaching gig with Stanford. The media made Willingham's reputation and helped him sustain it despite lots of evidence to the contrary, and they appear to still be cutting him huge slack on what went down over the past decade.