Shutting down spring break trips for Michigan football shows hypocrisy

Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney said he would never take his team on a trip during spring break.

“Heck no,” he told the Free Press this week. “My guys deserve their time off.”

Unless that time off happens to be on Christmas break. Or in the early summer. Or on Sundays in the fall, when Swinney, like a lot of college football coaches, expect certain players to spend time “on their own” studying film.

Not that it’s fair to just pick on Swinney. The hypocrisy is everywhere.

After all, Nick Saban, Alabama’s football coach, questioned, too, what the value was of taking a team on a trip during spring break as Jim Harbaugh did last year when he took U-M to Bradenton, Fla.

Harbaugh, of course, planned another spring break trip for his football team this year — to Italy. This time, instead of hanging out near a bunch of high-level recruits in talent-rich Florida, the Wolverines will spend time scoping out the Coliseum and touring the Vatican.

As far as marketing strategies go, it’s ingenious. U-M will make plenty of headlines as the players hang out in and around Rome.

And that’s the problem, as far as Swinney and Saban and a host of other coaches see it. Oh, they won’t admit it. They’ll talk about the plight of their student-athletes and the demands college football already puts on them.

But really, this is nothing more than a battle for potential recruits. Schools in talent-rich areas don’t want to give up their geographical advantage. Plain and simple.

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As soon as Harbaugh announced he was headed to Florida last year, coaches — primarily in the ACC and SEC — started complaining. Their conference commissioners complained, too.

Greg Sankey asked the NCAA to stop teams from practicing during spring break. Last week, he got his wish, when the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee voted to ban the practice.

Sankey wasn’t concerned about the well-being of Michigan football players. He didn’t care that they might lose out on frolicking in the sand somewhere or whatever else they’d be doing if Harbaugh hadn’t dragged them down to Florida.

Nor was he worried about schools in his own conference parroting the idea and forcing their players to take similarly awful trips to sunny places. Most of his schools have plenty of sun on campus already. Except for Missouri. Which doesn’t belong in the SEC anyway.

Sankey didn’t want Harbaugh — or any other Northern interloper with a brand name — coming down and setting up shop in the most fertile recruiting area in the country. As U-M athletic director Warde Manuel pointed out to USA TODAY last week:

“The rule didn’t get proposed until after we took the football team down to Florida for spring break, so I think you can read into that as you will.”

We can read plenty.

College football, first and foremost, is a turf war, a series of territorial sieges, led by coaches trying to win a propaganda war in the homes of 17- and 18-year-olds. Those homes are closer to Alabama and Clemson and Florida State than they are to U-M and Penn State and Iowa. So Harbaugh figured he could shrink the geography by taking the entire program south.

Look, last year’s trip to Florida wasn’t a peace-seeking mission for Harbaugh, either. It wasn’t designed to let his guys run free all week while sipping umbrella drinks — or downing Jager bombs — and dipping their toes in the ocean. If that were the case, he’d have packed up his program and taken over South Padre Island, or Cancun.

No, Harbaugh wanted players, which is why he encamped at the IMG Academy, home to — cough, cough — a plethora of promising recruits. That his own players got some sun and warmth and a break from the Ann Arbor gray was a bonus.

In other words, it was a win-win. Until Sankey and his coaches got wind of it, and cried “but what about the kids?”

Right. The kids.

Or, as the NCAA likes to call them, student-athletes.

I don’t blame Sankey and Swinney and even Saban — there were others, too — for crying foul play. They get paid a lot of money to win. Talent is the key. They have the talent.

What’s ridiculous, however, is when coaches and commissioners and, by extension, the NCAA, cherry-pick their moral arguments. As in: skipping Christmas and New Year’s and, even, Thanksgiving are OK. Blowing off “spring break” is not.

Which is why I’m with Manuel on this one. Last week’s ruling — and last year’s whining — has nothing to do with protecting college football players.

It has everything to do with trying to sign them.

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Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.

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