Leave it to Jim Harbaugh to keep college football fun in its post-National Signing Day period of dormancy.
A day after SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey announced the league is asking the NCAA to prohibit schools from holding spring practices during spring break -- a move clearly intended to prevent Harbaugh from following through on his plan to take the Wolverines' spring drills to Bradenton, Fla. -- Harbaugh came back Wednesday with this not-so-subtle subtweet:
Don't look for Sankey to be drawn into a Twitter skirmish, however.
Although the SEC's new commissioner has a stronger Twitter feed than most in similar positions, he sounded as though a social media tangle with a Big Ten coach wasn't befitting of a commissioner when reached by the Alabama Media Group.
"I'm not going to reduce what is an important conversation to some childhood use of Twitter," he said. "This is an important issue."
The former San Francisco 49ers coach has been innovating ever since he arrived at the school for which he once played, and that innovation has ruffled some of college football's proudest feathers. Most notably, he began improving Michigan's recruiting exposure in the talent-rich South by holding satellite camps around the country rather than keeping them on his own campus. SEC coaches didn't appreciate the tour, and the league has proposed legislation that would ban the practice. If that proposal is unsuccessful, however, Sankey essentially warned that if the SEC must play the satellite camp game, it will invest the resources to win it.
"If the national approach is that we want to have more aggressive summer camps and coaches touring around all summer, then we will not only engage in that behavior, we will certainly engage in that behavior more actively -- probably more effectively than others," Sankey told CBS Sports.
On the heels of that stand-off comes Harbaugh's bold move to take spring practices off-campus as well, a move Sankey sees as a violation of the NCAA's efforts to protect the amount of time that student-athletes are free of team obligations.
In Harbaugh's world, that's whining. Sankey, for his part, will try to do his talking with legislation.
*Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter **@ChaseGoodbread*.
