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Pac-12 commish: UCLA AD didn't vote correctly on satellite camps

Nick Bromberg
·College football and motorsports writer

Washington State coach Mike Leach was right.

Following the NCAA Division I Council's vote to ban satellite camps, Leach said 11 of the conference's members wanted to keep satellite camps around. However, the conference, through UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, the conference's representative, voted to ban the camps. He did not do what he was supposed to have done according to Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott.

"I think he's clear he did not vote the way he was supposed to vote," Scott said via ESPN. "We had 11 schools in our conference that wanted this looked at as we studied more comprehensively football recruiting issues – there's a variety of them – but in the meantime we'd prefer the status quo, which for us allows coaches to attend other camps in other markets."

Scott confirmed Leach's comment that 11 of the teams didn't support the ban. And while he didn't name UCLA as the lone dissenter, he certainly didn't rule the Bruins out as the one team supporting the ban telling people to draw their own conclusions.

Via SI.com, here's an email Guerrero sent to other Pac-12 ADs explaining the reasoning behind his vote.

Guerrero thought the ban would pass no matter the Pac-12's vote, so of the two available proposals (one from the ACC, another from the SEC), he voted for the one he believed would best benefit the Pac-12.

From SI.com:

UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero didn’t expect the satellite camp issue to come to a vote at the NCAA’s Division I Council meeting on April 9. But it did come to a vote, and it passed with Guerrero voting in favor. Guerrero—the Pac-12’s representative on the council—then had to tell his colleagues why he voted against the wishes of 11 of the league’s 12 schools. He wrote that when it became apparent the ban would pass no matter how the Pac-12 voted, he threw his support behind the proposal that most resembled one already on the Pac-12 books.

When he initially went to the Oversight Committee's meeting, Guerrero told SI.com he planned to vote against the ban, but things changed based on "discussions in the meeting" with representatives from other conferences.

Guerrero climbed from beneath the bus under which Scott threw him Wednesday and told SI.com that he went to the meeting with the intention of voting against the ban—if it even came to a vote. Guerrero had expected the Football Oversight Committee to table the satellite camp discussion, but a one-vote margin moved it to the council for action. And when it became apparent from the discussions in the meeting that the Big 12, Sun Belt and Mountain West would join the ACC and SEC in voting for the ban, Guerrero had to make a call because the Pac-12’s “no” vote would not change the outcome. This is common in the NCAA’s version of representative democracy. Occasionally leagues will direct a representative to vote a certain way no matter what.

It's important to note that the Pac-12's vote did not seal the fate of satellite camps on its own. The vote was 10-5 in favor of the ban (votes from Power Five conferences count double), so the vote would have been 8-7 in favor of the ban if the Pac-12 sided with the minority.

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But things really get interesting when you couple the Pac-12's vote along with the Sun Belt's vote. Texas State AD Larry Teis voted for the Sun Belt in favor of banning the camps. His coach, Everett Whithers, is for the camps. Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson said a majority of the conference was pro-satellite camp, though he said Teis had the latitude to do what he wanted. Benson also justified Teis' vote by saying it didn't change the balance of the vote.

Well, had the Pac-12 also vote along with the majority of its members, the Sun Belt would have helped keep satellite camps around. Yeah, this whole thing is an absolute cluster.

So what's next? Well, the discussion certainly isn't going to go away. And don't be surprised if some sort of compromise is figured out, if there isn't an outright reversal of the ban within the 60-day override period (since the ban didn't pass with an 85 percent majority, it can be overturned if 66.7 percent of FBS schools veto the measure). It's clear that the interests of a few have dictated the outcome here. And while that's not an uncommon occurrence in college football, the majority seems to be getting bigger and bigger.

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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!