From ESPN: INDIANAPOLIS -- Prep players may have to wait a little longer to start accepting scholarship offers. An NCAA committee announced Thursday that it will back a proposal to prohibit making scholarships offers to recruits before July 1 in the summer between their junior and senior years in high school. If passed, it would apply to all sports. The Link
Is it just me or does the whole world hate us and our success. They tried to stop coaches in waiting from recruiting ... now this.
This hurts the A&Ms, Techs, and Oklahoma States worse than us. You think we won't know where we stand? They are going to be flying REALLY blind not knowing how to devote their recruiting resources.
good grief. it is no business of the ncaa when a school offers a kid. when will the schools dump that anachronism?
what we should do is make the ncaa address oversigning. we could do it if we wanted to by jumping into it.
silly. it's just going to make a bunch of coaches say "well...i'm not NOT offering you a scholarship, but let's just say if you pick us you wont have to worry about the finances"
I don't know, the business was getting a little out of hand, with younger and younger players committing. Ninth graders, eighth graders? Where would it have stopped? We will still be recruitng well, and that is still an entire season early, seems OK to me. I'm sure, as Joe has so eloquently stated, that teams will find ways to express strong interest in players prior to that date.
To me this hurts the athletes. Some kids just want to get the recruiting process over with so they can concentrate on grades and their last high school year. I think that you can draw a line between recruiting middle school students an high school juniors. Would not have a problem with banning the offering of scholorships to middle school students or even high school freshmen.
The only thing they need to do is allow players to switch schools if the HC is fired or gone before the summer their senior season.
The only difference is that you will see a big press conference on day 1 of recruiting where about 15-20 kids make their announcement. This doesn't address things like Junior day or such. The funny thing is, this doesn't address anything with regard to saving money, level playing field, or any of the such. This is nothing more than a new rule, because the NCAA now thinks they have teeth. And I must say I agree with one of the previous posters, what the NCAA really needs to govern is the over signing of prospects, but as soon as Texas starts doing it, and gets really good, they will.
Street agents are too important for NCAA's cash cow, basketball. They will stay focused on big problems like kids who enjoy completing their legitimate recruitment spring of their junior year or earlier. Considering how many kids graduate in December, the notion that schollies would not even be permissibly extended until July is silly. I lined up my first job out of training more than 14 months in advance and was very glad for the ability it gave me to plan and prepare.
I'd like to see us and about 25 or thirty of our powerful collegiate friends tell the NCAA to take this idea and stick it where the Sun don't shine. Basically, you say to them "Push this through and enjoy your championship game between East Carolina and Weber State." This rule, if passed, won't seriously affect UT recruiting, but it's the principal of the thing. There are much more serious recruiting issues the NCAA should address, over-recruiting being just one of 'em. The NCAA needs some doctoring by the big boys...and needs to learn what business to keep their nose out of.
This could also hurt the players that want to verbal early in February. If a player can't verbal until July what if he gets an injury that makes him have to get out of football. If he has verbaled some schools like UT will honor it and give him a medical scholarship and at least he gets an education. But if the verbal date is in July he is stuck out of nowhere.
I think the college football world will learn to its chagrin that further restrictions on recruiting will benefit two main categories of programs: powers and cheaters. Texas will continue to draw recruits' attention through a wide variety of media, only a small part of which falls until formalized recruiting. Dirty programs will do fine as well: they are not affected by rules as we are. The losers will be up-and-comers that take advantage of early recruiting and established relationships to hold off (relatively) late offers from "big boys." The other losers will be kids, families, etc who want to plan as far in advance as possible, for example to facilitate finding kids housing or lining up nearby (legitimate) jobs for single parents of athletes. If you plan to enroll in January, planning a life for your family might be inconvenient if you couldn't even be offered a schollie before July. NCAA should worry about shutting down BkBall street agents instead of passing "Texas envy" recruiting rules like this and the "Muschamp rule." But of course that is their cash cow sport.
