Satellite camps begin this week for coaches around the country, and the verbal battles that have been simmering for months continue to boil over.
The latest episode came Tuesday, when Nick Saban ranted anew about satellite camps from SEC meetings in Florida, drawing a fiery response from Jim Harbaugh, the Michigan coach at the center of so much of the controversy.
Harbaugh blasted Saban — well, technically Alabama's HC — on Twitter with this broadside: " 'Amazing' to me — Alabama broke NCAA rules & now their HC is lecturing us on the possibility of rules being broken at camps. Truly 'amazing.' "
Earlier Tuesday Saban, speaking at SEC meetings, went off on the topic that’s swept through college football. He vehemently expressed concern for the future of the sport turning into something similar to AAU basketball. He called it the “Wild Wild West,” highlighting the potential compliance, regulation and organizational issues as to why these camps are bad for the game.
“Creating all these third parties that are going to get involved with the prospects and all that. And who gets exposed on that? I go to a camp and I’m talking to some guy I don’t know from Adam’s house cat and he’s representing some kid because he put the camp on, and then I’m in trouble for talking to this guy? And who even knows if the guy paid to go to the camp.“Is the NCAA going to do that? I mean, we do that at our camp. We have people responsible. They’re called compliance folks. What kind of compliance people do we have at these camps?”
Saban also mentioned Harbaugh by name in referencing the spread of the camps, according to the Associated Press. "There needs to be somebody that looks out for what's best for the game, not what's best for the Big Ten or what's best for the SEC or what's best for Jim Harbaugh," Saban said, "but what's best for the game of college football — the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players and the people that play it. That's bigger than all of this."
Harbaugh's comment about broken rules was in reference to allegations against a former Saban assistant coach, who recently resigned for what was reported as a recruiting violation issue.
As with his previous public Twitter comments against Tennessee's Butch Jones and Georgia's Kirby Smart, he did not use the opposing coach's name. But there was no mistaking his target.
The camps were temporarily banned by a vote of the conference commissioners in the early April, but the attempted ban was overturned by the NCAA. The SEC and ACC were among the biggest detractors of the camps.
Though satellite camps have existed for years, many more schools have climbed aboard the bandwagon this year, including some SEC schools, but Harbaugh has become the face of their proliferation.
Beginning Wednesday morning, the Michigan football coaching staff will fire a figurative starting gun in two parts of the world and begin a 30-day sprint unlike anything previously seen in college football or even a presidential campaign: 38 camps, 21-states, two-countries.
The mainland United States camps, if taken in order — probably not physically possible — would total around 20,000 miles. Add the few staff members taking the 20,000-mile trip to American Samoa this week and Australia in early June, and then another nearly 12,000 for the end of the month (Hawaii-American Samoa-Ann Arbor), and the total number of miles in the month could cruise past 50,000.
The first chance for Saban and Harbaugh to cross paths? If the Alabama coach attends the June 10 Sound Mind, Sound Body camp in Detroit.
Contributing: Laken Litman; and Mark Snyder of the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK
