The NCAA has announced new rule proposals to make the game safer for players, and unlike the $2000 stipend, I can't imagine these rules being overruled by the membership. The five proposals are largely concerning special teams, and they are as follows:

• Kickoffs and touchbacks: Kickoffs go from the 35-yard line instead of the 30, mimicking the rule change the NFL has made. Touchbacks would come out to the 25-yard line instead of the 20 to encourage receiving teams to take more touchbacks. Players on the kicking team must be within five yards of the 35-yard line when kicked to reduce the running start they get. The NCAA's data shows that injuries are more common on kickoffs than any other aspect of the game, so these rules are intended to cut back on those injuries.
• Helmets coming off: If a player's helmet comes off and it's not because of an opponent ripping it off, it works like an injury. The player must not participate in the rest of the play and has to come off the field for at least one play. The proposal doesn't say so, but I'll bet this is as much about getting players to wear their helmets properly as it is trying to keep them from coming off during a play.
• Blocking below the waist: Blocking below the waist would be, with few exceptions, impermissible for anyone but stationary offensive players who are in the tackle box when the ball is snapped. Under the current rules, it is possible to block below the waist anytime "the opposing player is likely to be prepared for this contact". That broad language includes on special teams.
• Shield blocking on punts: The NCAA is concerned about players who attempt to jump over the back defenders in the shield punt formation. Therefore, rules about jumping them become identical to those about jumping during place kicks: you can jump straight up in front of but not over top of the blockers.
• Kick returner safety: This proposal is vaguely worded, but it sounds like a return of the old halo rule.

Football player safety has never been more in the spotlight, especially with hundreds of former players suing the NFL over head trauma. As a matter of fact, player safety should be a central concern. Rules should adapt and change as we come to know more about the wear and tear that the game puts on players' bodies.

In college football, it's especially appropriate to try to reduce head trauma. These players are enrolled at institutions of higher learning with many on scholarship to be there. They are called student-athletes. Protecting players' brains seems like it should fit right in with the core missions of the universities themselves, no?

Weeks after former LSU TE DeAngelo Peterson panned the team's offensive game plan in the BCS title game, the game's certified goat is grousing about it too. Jordan Jefferson has come out against what his coaches cooked up and called in the rematch with Alabama:

"I definitely didn't expect for [the title game] to play like that. Alabama was a little bit more prepared than us. There was a lot of things that we should've did different to catch a rhythm on offense"...

Jefferson wanted to "put the ball in different passing areas, use our talent on the receiving side."

"... We have great guys in those areas and sometimes we just wonder why we don't use those guys," he continued on WCNN. "But we're not the one calling the plays. We still have to go out and execute what the coaches and coordinators are calling. We can't complain as players, but sometimes we do question that."

Jefferson was definitely right about a few things. He mentioned that the team faced too many second- and third-and-long situations, which is almost certain death against a defense as good as Alabama's. It also is the team's job to execute, and Jefferson certainly didn't do that much well. He made some puzzling reads on option plays and unloaded an unforgettably bad interception on a shovel pass.

Maybe I just didn't pay as much attention then, but I don't remember many players distancing themselves from the game plan after the last BCS championship game offensive horror show when Ohio State flopped against Florida. When two senior leaders come out and publicly call out the offensive staff like this with Peterson and now Jefferson, it really makes you wonder about these players and the program. Toss in a high profile recruit flipping from LSU to Texas on signing day due to perceived low team morale, and I don't know what to think anymore.

It's clear that even though the Tigers went 13-0 en route to their SEC championship, the BCS National Championship Game loss to Bama devastated the team. Whether it will end up having devastated the program is something we won't find out until next fall.

One of the immediate lessons coming out of the 2011 college football season is that a playoff is coming to the Football Bowl Subdivision. Even the traditionally anti-playoff Big Ten has leaked a plus one plan, though it's more to make the conference look like its not standing in the way of progress than anything. The wheels are turning and momentum is gaining.

It's kind of odd then to see Mike Slive of all people, who proposed a plus one back in 2008, trying to pump the brakes on the playoff speculation:

"Really a lot of this discussion is premature, and I want to respect the process that we're in," Slive told members of the Nashville Sports Council during a question-and-answer session. "We've had four-year formats since we started. We've done it on the basis of four years, so each four-year period you have to sit down and decide what format is going to be going forward. So we have decided to sit down and talk about this from every different side"...

"What would [a possible playoff format] look like and whether it's actually going to happen, all of that is premature," Slive said. "I think we need the time to sit down and analyze it. We need time to take ideas back to our respective conferences and ... a decision to be made sometime later this year as we begin to talk about the ... next format."

Given that Slive is nothing if not a lawyer, it's actually not so strange at all when you think about it. There is a negotiating process, and by God, they're going to do some negotiating. Calm down people, nothing to see here just yet.

Slive has also been an under-promise/over-deliver kind of commissioner, preferring to handle things in the background before making any public statements. Think about how conference expansion went. Every statement from the SEC attempted to pour cold water on the fires of speculation right up until the announcements and helmet-trading ceremonies were made. Plus, his policies for the league about coaches and schools handling their grievances in private first rather than in public (shout out, Lane Kiffin!) also reflect that instinct of his.

Slive and the SEC are certainly not going to be standing in the way of a college football playoff. I think the commissioner just doesn't want to get people's hopes up that a format will be announced later this spring. The current BCS contract runs for another two seasons, and it may take most of that time to hammer out details among the various conferences and their disparate desires.

If I could put my finger on one reason why I don't like Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, it's that he comes off like the worst kind of politician. He's devoted solely to his conference and rarely acts like he cares about the big picture. He reeks of condescension while sometimes engaging in spin doctoring. And now, he's jumping on the bandwagon of an inevitability either to make it sound like it was his idea all along or to guide it in a direction that suits his desires (or both).

A college football playoff is coming. It's a matter of when, not if. Actually, it's probably not even a matter of when anymore, as "after the current BCS contract expires" is a pretty sure bet.

Yesterday, the Big Ten leaked details of a possible plus one playoff plan that would fit most of the conference's desires. I say "most" because, based on past comments by its power brokers, one of those desires is actually not having a playoff. The top four of the BCS would be skimmed off the top and entered into a separate bracket. The semifinals would be played on campuses, while the final would rotate around sites that bid on the right to hold it.

Most importantly for the Big Ten, this playoff takes place entirely outside of the bowl system. Having the final be bid on by disparate sites rather than rotate among the BCS bowls preserves the Rose Bowl, and preserving that is arguably the conference's top priority. You could even argue that it enhances the Rose Bowl over the current BCS, because it won't be overshadowed every four years by a BCS National Championship Game being played on the very same field a week later.

Honestly, I really like the idea of bidding out the final. Currently, schools essentially pay for the right to play in bowls via ticket guarantees. Sometimes the fan bases pick up the entire tab, but often the schools get stuck with giant bills for unsold tickets. This strikes me as backwards. The bowl committees should pay the schools or conferences first and then be on the hook for making that money back via selling all the tickets on their own. That's how pretty much every other non-in house ticketed event works. This idea of bidding out the title game also fits right in with the Big Ten's and Pac-12's exploration of possibly running their own bowls, another way to cut some leeches off of the surface of college football.

I've seen a lot of praise for the idea of playing the semifinals on campuses, and rightfully so. The on-campus experience is one of the big things that makes college football so awesome. However, I'm disappointed to see so many people acting like the Big Ten came up with the idea. It is part of the years-old Death to the BCS plan, and it's been kicked around in informal debates for far longer than that.

The idea of southern teams having to play up north in the cold is an appealing one to the Big Ten constituency, but it's largely overblown. For one thing, look at a map of all the I-A schools, or even just the current BCS schools. There are a lot more schools outside of heavy snow areas than in them.

Plus, let's hunt through the BCS's history. If we assume that the top four of the standings wouldn't change if we had this plus one plan—and that's a very poor assumption given how voter manipulation works*—on only five occasions would a team have been sent to a place with an average January high temperature more than 10 degrees colder than home. Two of those would have been Colorado (47°) being sent to Nebraska (35°) and Miami (74°) being sent to Tallahassee (63°). Only three times, with two SEC teams plus Oklahoma getting sent to Ohio State, would a team have played somewhere with average January snowfall greater than two inches above what they get at home. In fact, 21 of the 28 on-campus games would have been played in places that average less than two inches of snow in January, period.

This plan, by the way, is generically a "seeded plus one" because the top four teams get pulled off to the side and seeded after the regular season. I expect to see other conferences float other plans, some of which might be an "unseeded plus one". In that case the bowls would play out largely as they are now, and then the top two teams after the bowls get pulled out to play a championship game. Now you can keep those two terms straight if you haven't heard them before as the debate unfolds.

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For the second time in five years team that went 9-7 in the NFL regular season made the Super Bowl. This time, that 9-7 team actually won the thing. It's enough to make a die hard college football fan scoff at the pro league's standards for who gets to be called champion.

Before going further, it's worth noting that the NFL is fundamentally different than the college game when it comes to scheduling. NFL teams play 16 regular season games instead of 12, so they have more opportunities to pick up losses. Plus, they don't get to stack a third or a fourth of their schedules with cupcakes who are outclassed in every conceivable way. If college football had 16 regular season games and only competition between the top 32 teams, there would not be too many zero- or one-loss champions there either.

That said, there's no reason to blindly accept a team with a .563 winning percentage as a rightful "champion" unless you're a Chan Gailey enthusiast. Rejecting that premise does not mean, however, that you reject the concept of a playoff. It just means that the NFL's playoffs are too large.

On that level, 12 of the 32 teams make the postseason every year. That comes out to 37.5% of all the league's teams. If college football did a bracket of an equivalent size, it would have 45 teams in it. Cut the field down to just the current 67 in BCS conferences plus Notre Dame and you still get a field of 25. Not even the status quo-hating Dan Wetzel and friends who wrote Death to the BCS are promoting a playoff that large.

I want to see a playoff in college football, but I don't want to see a 7-6 team or 8-4 team in it. If they keep the bracket at a reasonable (i.e. smaller than the NFL) size, we never will see such a team in it. In fact, look through the archive of BCS standings. Not that the BCS formula is perfect, but you'll notice a pattern that there is generally a big gap between either No. 7 and No. 8 or No. 8 and No. 9.

Once you get past the top seven or eight teams, you find that teams don't really have realistic claims towards being a championship candidate. On purely competitive grounds, capping the playoff at eight teams (or less) shouldn't be controversial. It, of course, will always be controversial who gets a shot at the title and who doesn't, but that's a cut off point that should be able to find a consensus. Expanding beyond eight is difficult anyway because teams can only play one game per week.

I think ultimately though, this all boils down to a fairly fundamental argument. Is college football its own sport that should only be concerned about its own competitively purity, or is it a fundraiser that subsidizes nearly every other sport that schools sponsor? While in practice it is both, I fear that more and more, the powers that be see it solely as the latter.

It's too late for men's college basketball; its tournament accounts for roughly 95% of the NCAA's income. It's no wonder they floated a plan to go to 96 teams two years ago. Increasing March Madness revenue is far and away the easiest way to increase the NCAA's operating budget, something that's important in this day and age when investigations are getting longer, more numerous, and more expensive by the year. The schools could all chip in some more dues money, or they could fabricate a "First Four" to try to wring out a few more dollars.

The BCS is happy to act like the cartel it is, and even the staunchly anti-playoff Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany doesn't believe the current system maximizes profits. However, in this weak economy with state and federal education budgets in jeopardy, many programs can't afford to leave postseason money on the table while leeching money from their general university budgets anymore.

Starting up a playoff would generate more money. If those in charge then look at it as nothing more than a piggy bank, then we'll never be safe from bracket creep. Hopefully the advent of other revenue streams like conference networks and online streaming deals can stave off that temptation and keep the field small.

It will never feel right to crown an 8-4 team as champion anymore than it feels right to see a 9-7 team take home the Lombardi Trophy.

Wrapping up the season for each of the SEC teams

Whenever a team like Vanderbilt has a breakout season -- in terms of going to a bowl game three years after the last one, when the gap between the last two was nearly a quarter of a century -- it's always good to ask the skeptical question: Was the season a fluke?

Not because that takes away from what Vanderbilt accomplished; any way the Commodores can get to a bowl game should be welcome by their beleaguered fans. But because it gets to the question of whether a team and its coaching staff -- in this case, a new staff lead by James Franklin -- are truly breaking out, or just getting a few bounces that will get them a temporary bump.

We've been here before with Vanderbilt and asked the same questions, most recently after 2008. (Credit note: I cribbed the idea from an SMQ/Dr. Saturday post about Mississippi State the year before.) And when you look at the difference for the Commodores in the SEC slate this year and that year, there are reasons to be hopeful.

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Former Florida head coach Urban Meyer has gotten a lot of heat from some fellow Big Ten coaches over his recruiting tactics. Specifically Meyer, and hold back your horror here for a second, went after recruits that were committed to other schools. I know, I know. It's a good thing I first heard about it while sitting down.

Bret Bielema is upset, which is understandable given that he lost an offensive line recruit to Meyer on signing day. He's even decided to cry complain to Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany about it. Mark Dantonio called Meyer unethical. Meyer responded to the complaints thusly:

"You're pissed because we went after a committed guy? Guess what, we got 9 guys who better go do it again," said Meyer. "Do it a little harder next time."

Translation: "U MAD BRO?" Meyer has crossed over into Lane Kiffin territory in terms of agitating fellow coaches in his conference. I'm glad we could all share this moment.

I'm a little confused at all the outrage, because I thought we got all this settled when Rich Rodriguez got to Michigan. There was no real gentleman's agreement not to go after committed recruits. There was some complaining about RichRod doing that initially, but it all died away. What has changed?

My guess is that these other Big Ten coaches actually think Meyer can win at Ohio State. He won at Bowling Green despite never even having been a coordinator before becoming a head coach. He made Utah the first ever BCS buster. He won two national championships at Florida and easily could have won a third if it wasn't for Nick Saban.

I think the consensus up there was that Rodriguez was not a serious threat to win big after his first year. He was seen a force of change initially, which is why people got all rankled about his recruiting, but then 3-9 killed that quickly. It became a given that his system wouldn't work in the Big Ten, and everyone settled down. His system would, in fact, work in the Big Ten, as it was his poor defensive coaching choices that did him in.

Meyer is a threat to win. He also comes with the stigma of having worked in the SEC. All I hear from Bielema and Dantonio is: "Can't you see what's happening? He's trying to make us just like the SEC!!"

Guess what? The Big Ten is just like the SEC, only it's covered itself up in some kind of abrasively arrogant, faux genteel wallpaper. While Delany is the troll pulling all the strings, the conference is probably best personified in Jim Tressel. Tressel used his sweater vest and boring personality to hide the fact that he's a ruthless competitor who was willing to break rules to try to get ahead. They're pretty much all like that, only they prefer to have a veneer of sanctimonious righteousness covering it up.

Meyer is up front about his commitment to winning, as is everyone in the SEC. As is most everyone in the country, for that matter. It's especially rich to hear Bielema, who dropped 83 points on Indiana and went for two while up by a huge margin late in a game, act as though he's not a win-at-all-costs type. (Note: Former OSU LB Brian Rolle says Wisconsin recruited him up to signing day despite having committed to the Buckeyes. He was a freshman in 2007, which was Bielema's second year at UW. Busted, Bret.)

I think these coaches aren't just threatened by the idea that Meyer will dominate the conference with Ohio State as Tressel did before him. I think they're also worried that he'll finally put an end to the bankrupt idea that the Big Ten really is all that different from everyone else.

Alabama came into the day on top of all of the recruiting rankings, and it finished it still on top of three of them. So, we can safely say that Alabama is your Mythical Recruiting National Champion once again. Here are how all the conference's teams ended up in the four major rankings as of 7:30 NSD evening.

Remember that Rivals only publishes its top 50 and ESPN only does a top 25. The numbers in parenthesis are the teams' ranks in the average player ranking standings.

These could change as a few more players decide what they want to do. Highly rated WR Stefon Diggs is waiting for a while to make his final decision, and he's considering Auburn and Florida among others. Rivals also isn't counting Josh Harvey-Clemons as a part of Georgia's class yet. He committed to UGA earlier today and has told media he still is a Bulldog, but his grandfather is apparently nowhere to be found at the moment. He needs his grandfather to sign the NLI as that's who his legal guardian is.

Note: I've updated the Rivals ranks as Harvey-Clemons's NLI finally made it to Georgia on the morning of 2/2. Auburn and Texas A&M fell one spot in the overall standings and A&M and Tennessee fell one spot in the average rankings as a result of Georgia leap-frogging them.

For now though, this is where they all stack up. Congrats to all.