1. Both USC athletic director Pat Haden and Stanford coach David Shaw last week described expanding training table to three meals a day throughout the academic year as something between mandatory and a national emergency. Cost estimates for the expansion at a major FBS program could be as high as $750,000. It probably would have happened even if UConn point guard Shabazz Napier had not talked about hunger. But embarrassing the NCAA is a good method these days.

2. The reduction of training table to one meal per day took effect in the NCAA’s cost-cutting reforms of 1991. That was the same package that included the 20-hour rule, which has become a mockery, and the “restricted-earnings” assistants, who could be paid only $16,000 per year. The NCAA had to pay a $54.5 million settlement in 1999 to undo that decision. Undoing the cutback on meals nearly guts the entire reform package.

3. SEC commissioner Mike Slive is spending three days this week as the Executive-in-Residence at UMass’ Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management. In a speech Wednesday night, Slive described his job thusly: “Today doesn’t exist for me. I live in tomorrow. That’s my job. Today is the job of 35 other people (SEC staff). I am the trustee of a sacred public trust, and if you live in the South, you know exactly what I mean.” Slive also said the SEC will decide at the spring meeting in Destin next month whether to stay at an eight-game conference schedule, or go to nine beginning in 2016.