FOR:
There has been a lot of talk lately about the ethics of recruiting in the news, in particular how coaches ought to interact with recruits.
With the continued permeation of social media into the lives of high school recruits, the question needs to be addressed: How much should coaches be able to contact recruits via social media, especially on Facebook and Twitter?
It’s a tricky question. On the player side of things, nobody wants to constantly be bombarded with text messages and tweets from drooling position coaches.
It sucks for the families, and it sucks for the kids.
Ideally, this would be an easily fixable solution: Ban coaches from tweeting or texting players, and let that be that.
Only one problem: How are you going to enforce it?
I’ll give you a second to think about it.
OK, that’s what I thought.
In an ideal world, one could restrict these coaches from incessantly hounding recruits, but Twitter’s wings spread too wide, and Facebook’s privacy settings are simply too impenetrable.
How will the NCAA know if Sonny Dykes sends Jared Goff a private message on Facebook? If the recruits are complicit, and the coaches are complicit, it’s nearly impossible.
And it’s not like college football coaches exactly prize morality. They’re homicidally competitive and job-obsessed, stopping at nothing to gain even the slightest of advantages.
Even if the NCAA imposed the strictest possible sanctions, coaches would find a way around them. We’ve seen it over and over. Ohio State, USC, Oregon — and who knows how many more.
It’s inevitable that coaches will tweet and Facebook recruits; the NCAA is a powerless entity and is best staying completely out of the equation.
A better idea, I submit, is involving those who actually have a tangible and real effect on both the behavior of coaches and recruits — the parents.
If the coaches and parents of each individual conversed about tweeting and Facebooking limits, creating an acceptable line that the coaches could approach in terms of social media interactions, actual progress could be made.
The coaches cross the established and agreed-upon line, and the parents intervene.
The coaches suffer actual consequences and face the fear of parental influence instead of the effectively invisible and impotent hand of the NCAA.
It’s an unfortunate problem that gets worse every single year that Twitter and Facebook gain influence. But the NCAA is kidding itself if it believes it can actually make a difference.
The whole ordeal feels like it should have a simple solution; nobody on either side of the coin wants to deal with the burdensome and obnoxious consequences of a full-scale invasion into the daily life of high school kids.
But as long as the NCAA halfheartedly throws regulations at colleges, coaches won’t change their behavior. Paradoxically, or perhaps ironically, only when the NCAA ceases to impose regulations on social media interactions will actual progress commence in earnest.
— Michael Rosen
AGAINST:
Last February, I interviewed former head coach Jeff Tedford for the National Signing Day press conference, and the biggest impression I took away that day was that Tedford was outdated and overwhelmed in the new age of recruiting.
I resented Tedford for being unable to adapt to modern times. He had little to no idea how to work Facebook or Twitter. He relied on Tosh Lupoi to do the heavy lifting in keeping in touch with the kids, and once Lupoi bolted to Washington, all the five-star recruits committed to Cal decommitted.
Instead of falling behind the rest of college football by being a straight arrow of the old-school way, sometimes I felt one needs to cut corners to get ahead in this dog-eat-dog world of college football recruiting.
Now, I am one year older — hopefully one year wiser as well. And my opinion on the current state of college football recruiting has veered far away from my opinions of yesteryear.
When I read my colleague Jordan Bach-Lombardo’s column that the NCAA had “eliminated the restrictions of methods of communication with recruits” and removed “the limit on the number of coaches who can recruit off campus at any one time,” I was irate.
What the NCAA needs is not fewer regulations against recruiters — it needs more. It needs to tighten college football programs’ recruiting tactics of harassing and pressuring high school recruits to making a decision they don’t want to make.
In rebuttal, the coaches and recruiters will likely say that the decision of what school the recruit will attend ultimately lies with the recruit himself. That’s a simple way of looking at it. The incessant texting and tweeting at the recruits by coaches muddle the recruit’s priorities and mislead him to make a short-term decision that doesn’t pay off for the recruit in the future.
It is ultimately not the recruit who is donning the hat of the school of his choice in front of the televisions; many times, it’s the silver-tongued recruiter or booster who got to the recruit’s head the fastest, making arguably the biggest decision of the recruit’s teenage life.
The NCAA first needs to retract its decision to streamline recruiting methods. From there, the NCAA should tighten the restrictions by, say, creating an independent committee that can police the recruiters to lighten the pressure on the recruits.
A committee that polices the recruiters’ activities can also help nip in the bud for the pervasive problem of improper benefits, which the NCAA tried to solve by handing out massive punishments to the guilty programs.
Unfortunately, that’s about the best remedy I can offer to college football’s hidden tumor. I agree that the proposal is vague and idealistic. Perhaps it’s me looking at the issue the simple way.
But something needs to be done. The NCAA needs to tighten its belt, not throw it into the trash bin.
For now, the NCAA sided with the latter — to go hands-off and let things play out on their own. As I wait for the consequences of the decision, I am left asking the same question Tedford brought up in the press conference:
“When do these kids have a chance to go to school and be a kid?”
— Seung Y. Lee