Georgia and the SEC Are Competing for the National Championship of Paranoia

After the State of Georgia recently passed a new open records law, which gives public school athletic departments up to a whopping 90 days to respond to open records requests, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle revealed the laws' true intentions.

"I hope it brings us a national championship is what I hope," Cagle said.

A national championship of what, exactly? Tops in the nation at government secrecy?

As it turns out, Cagle was talking about college football. The law was passed thanks to the urging of Georgia football coach Kirby Smart, who met with the legislature to explain to them that it's easier to obtain open records in Georgia than it is in Alabama, where Smart was previously an assistant coach. Now it's harder to obtain public records in Georgia than anywhere else in the country.

How on earth could an open records law help Georgia football? Some representatives pointed to "recruiting information" that could be gained, but much of the correspondence between recruits and coaches is not subject to open records laws in the first place. Plus, most relevant information is easily available online. Recruiting services track which schools are recruiting which players, and players often post the recruiting material they receive online. Nothing in recruiting is a secret.

A more pragmatic-sounding—yet no more reasonable—justification came from Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity, who said that the new law will make things easier on a time-stressed FOIA office. Only UGA has subsequently used the new law to send players' arrest reports, which would usually circumvent the FOIA office, into that office's jurisdiction. So much for reducing stress!

Outside of making life harder and slower for journalists and public watchdogs, a more restrictive open records law is not going to affect the on-field performance of Georgia athletics in any significant way. If open records laws had any impact on football success, then Vanderbilt, which as a private school is not subject to releasing any records, would be a powerhouse.

Instead, the Commodores, in all their secrecy glory, went 4-8 last season and have never won an SEC Championship.

What's really going on here? Simple. Smart and Georgia football's push for this law reflects a creeping, rampant paranoia among SEC schools, who worry about any possible competitive disadvantage that could hamper winning. It's irrational, to be sure, but also understandable given the outsized pressure to win in big-time college football.

Who can blame Smart for feeling that pressure? His predecessor, Mark Richt, was fired after averaging 9.7 wins per year over 15 seasons at Georgia, a stint that included seven top 10 finishes. If Smart sees anything that Alabama or another rival might have that he doesn't, he has to immediately worry that it might affect his inability to be better than Richt. And from that worry flows paranoia, a gnawing sense that everything—even irrelevant things—could cause Georgia to lose football games.

Really, this isn't just about Georgia. As Alabama coach Nick Saban has said, it's considered a failure by most of the SEC to finish outside of college football's top four.

"I don't think there's any question about it," Saban said. "In some circumstances, I saw it happen this year. Coaches who won nine games and averaged winning 9.5 games over 15 years lose their job. Based on what standard?"

Saban has a point: just a few months ago, LSU almost paid $15 million to fire coach Les Miles, who only has been to two national championship games—winning one of them!— in the past 10 years, and also recruited a top class to Baton Rouge in 2016. Why? Because apparently consistently contending for a national championship isn't enough—a questionable bit of logic in a self-proclaimed amateur sport that claims it's not about the money.

Anyway, it's no wonder that SEC coaches are searching for advantages where there aren't any. Take their recent push for the banning of satellite camps. The SEC took issue with Michigan holding camps in SEC territory, so it got the camps shut down altogether, worrying that Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh was using them to his advantage.

Keep in mind: those same camps never helped coaches identify players that the SEC would be interested in. Michigan got one whole player from its entire 2015 satellite camp tour, and that was the 39th-ranked player in Alabama, a recruit who didn't have a single SEC offer. Satellite camps were mostly used by lesser-known recruits to get offers from smaller schools. They had no bearing whatsoever on Georgia-LSU.

Still, the SEC schools' thinking went something like this:

What if one time a top running back recruit does decide to pick Michigan because the Wolverines held a camp in Alabama? Then what if they moved up a spot ahead of my school in the recruiting rankings? Then what if fans question my recruiting? Then what if my running back fumbles in the conference championship game, and fans wonder why we didn't have the running back Michigan got? What if that puts me on the hot seat, and then I get fired for only winning nine games in a rebuilding year and the toaster starts laughing at me?

It's a spiral into insanity.

Look, college football has always been hyper competitive. Schools don't trust each other, so they create rules to govern recruiting. Coaches of slow-tempo teams try to create disingenuous rules to slow down up-tempo teams. But these rules at least affect what happens on the field.

With the pressure to win greater than ever, SEC schools have now pushed a two of the most nonsensical rule/law changes in the history of college football, despite the fact that the things they're fighting—satellite camps and open records requests—don't affect wins and losses.

It's one thing to be competitive. It's another to be paranoid. The SEC has crossed the line from the former to the latter, largely because it can't seem to distinguish between the two.