College Recruiting

College football recruiting is about to undergo a drastic change... and not for the better.  As of August 1st of this year recruiting rules are changing so that college coaches and contact recruits as much as they want.  Apparently this is the NCAA's response to the ever growing social media fads.  You can read the specifics and some coaches reactions here Link.  The NCAA did this so they could focus on other more important issues, but I feel like this is an important issue, the NCAA needs to looks at what they are promoting with this new proposal.

To me this is promoting the wrong idea to potential recruits about the NCAA and how they view recruits.  The main goal for a high school student is to graduate with good grades and to develop relationships with people their own age.  Now with these new rules recruits will spend even more time than they do now reading emails, opening mail, checking their Facebook page all to see what kind of contact they got from what coach that day.  As if they are not busy enough already from the correspondents they get already from coaches, it will easily be at least 10x more now.  High schoolers need to focus on academics, or even getting a college football scholarship will not matter because they fail classes and do not graduate.  Just imagine a recruit sitting down to do his math homework that would normally take a half hour.  But after they sit down they get an email or text message from a college football coach every five minutes, it suddenly take over an hour to do homework.  And how can you concentrate on homework when every few minutes your attention is drawn to something completely unrelated to school work.

Another drawback is that now that there is no restrictions, bigger budget schools like Notre Dame, USC, Florida, Alabama are going to hire people not even related to football to send out brochures, flyers, portfolios, to send out texts messages and emails.  Athletic departments are going to increase in size just because schools are going to hire grunts to do all the manual laborer.  Which can be a good thing and a bad thing, it creates more jobs, but its a job that is ruining the future.  These new laws are also going to widen the recruiting gap that already exists between the big budget schools and the schools that do not receive much funding.  The more money a school has to buy people and to recruit, they better recruits they are going to get, it is pretty simple.

It will be really interesting to see what happens the first year these laws are in existence, and what the reactions will be from college coaches, because so far the vote seems to be split down the middle.

One more thing about college football recruiting, the NCAA needs to pass a law that makes it wrong for coaches to offer a scholarship or even contact a player before their junior year in high school.  kids that are 14-15 years old do not need to worry about where they are going to play college football, they are not or are barely into high school.  Another way this can go is if a college football coach sees a kids highlights when he was 15 and offer him a scholarship, and then that same players does not do as well as planned, and the coach takes away his offer, is that not going to devastate that kid, especially the younger they are.  This seems wrong.