Today's SEC Meetings included a minor bombshell: South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier presented a proposal to the SEC to pay football players $300 per game, and seven coaches — Spurrier, Florida's Will Muschamp, Alabama's Nick Saban, LSU's Les Miles, Tennessee's Derek Dooley, Mississippi State's Dan Mullen, and Mississippi's Houston Nutt — agreed not only to the proposal, but to the idea of paying that money out of their own salaries.
As Sports Illustrated writer Andy Staples, a former Florida walk-on, notes, it won't happen, but it is interesting, both for timing and unsurprising generosity.
This news comes on the same day that Florida recruit Jessamen Dunker was among several recruits speaking out in favor of paying college athletes more than current athletic scholarships do, and in the wake of high-profile investigations at USC, Auburn, and Ohio State that all threw the value of a college football player into question.
All seven coaches in agreement with the proposal make more than $1 million per year. So it's no huge surprise they would want to reward the players who risk life and limb on college gridirons with a little more than the relatively scant compensation they do get: these coaches know how much their players are worth. And adding $3,600 to a player's tab yearly isn't an outrageous sum, nor is the around $300,000 it would cost each coach to fully fund this proposal a major loss.
It'll be interesting to see if this proposal has legs or a chance of mutating into a real threat to change the system.