Glad that's over with

So, as you probably know by now, the Tide football program got the lashes with a wet noodle treatment from the NCAA. No lost scholarships, no postseason bans, maybe a handful of vacated victories no one will ever remember are vacated unless they're looking them up in a book.

Which, to be perfectly honest with you, is fine. Yeah, it would have been fun to see the coachbot squirm under having to recruit a couple fewer players for next year's class (or having find another couple of current players willing to go on medical scholarship, natch), but in the end the only reason this was a potentially big deal at all was the Tide's "repeat violator" status. We are, after all, talking about only a handful of football players who by all accounts repaid the value of whatever textbooks they'd mistakenly been allowed to acquire ... I don't think Tide fans could have blamed the NCAA if they'd wanted to send a firmer "that's TWO strikes" kind of message, but at the same time, we're not exactly talking about a teamwide effort to operate a speakeasy in the basement of a campus dorm, either. The squads that made up the bulk of K-Scar's 200 involved athlete are apparently getting the brunt of the NCAA sanctions, and that's probably only fair.

Which means that the real developments here are that Mike Slive's dream of a probation-less SEC is dead again--way to ruin it for everyone, guys--and that a second set of sanctions, with 'Bama hypothetically a repeat repeat violator, could see the NCAA bring their Serious Hammer out of the closet.

At the very least, we can all now move on to more pressing topics. Like, for instance, this guy: great father, or greatest father?