The Black Eye of College Football Recruiting

You are a top high school running back. Your name appears on all the top recruiters’ boards. You are two months away from national signing day and you have offers from all the major Division I programs.

Every school you have ever dream of playing for wants you. With 20+ college offers, what puts one of those schools over the top?

There is no denying that players are offered improper benefits by coaches, boosters and agents who have no physical tie to a particular university in an effort to bring the top talent to their respective schools.

Corruption over recent years has taken a turn for the worst. More and more college programs are offering improper benefits and being busted for it. Look no further than the recent scandals at the University of Southern California and the University of Miami.

Both schools were caught offering improper benefits to some of the top talent in the country. Reggie Bush’s family was supplied with a 3,000-square-foot home which belonged to a New Era Sports & Entertainment representative.

Miami on the other hand was involved in a $930 million Ponzi scheme where a non-affiliated, self proclaimed, booster offered money and other gifts to at least 15 current and former Hurricane players.

Nevin Shapiro, who was the brains behind the Ponzi scheme, was pictured handing checks directly to Miami President Donna Shalala at numerous charity events. Since he is not an affiliated booster of the school, this was illegal from the start.

Many of these extra benefits were not known until the players were already attending school or, in many cases, already in the NFL.

Although these benefits were not known during the recruiting process, it would be ignorant to think that these deals weren’t discussed with these players beforehand.

“Yes, I do think that goes on,” said Craig Clements, a former high school Athletic Director at DeLand High School in DeLand Fla., In reference to extra benefits being discussed prior to a student attending a certain university. “You [the university] do it until you get caught, or you do it until the rules change. And then you find other ways to get your advantage.”

A popular name that has popped up in recent months is Texas area recruiter Willie Lyles. According to an ESPN article Lyles told Texas A&M that it had to “beat $80,000 if it wanted to sign star recruit Patrick Peterson in 2007.”

These allegations and ensuing investigation did not begin, of course, until this year, after Peterson had already withdrawn from college and entered in the NFL draft.

“You can’t do that. If he is getting paid by a certain school, like reports are saying, then he is dead wrong,” Preston Jackson, a former Notre Dame defensive back and currently the owner of Big County Preps, a popular Tampa Bay area company that evaluates and provides scouting reports of high school football players, said. “That stuff happens though. The problem with this is that it got out in the open. Has it been going on? I’m sure it has. He wouldn’t be the first; I doubt he will be the last.”

The NCAA is currently investigating a $6,000 payment to Lyles’ scouting firm as well as a $25,000 payment made to Lyles’ firm a few weeks before a prospect de-committed from Temple and enrolled at Oregon. According to reports they’re still trying to track down where these payments originated from.

The NCAA has countless regulations in place to monitor when college coaches are allowed to talk to high school players.

These windows of opportunity are always changing and it is difficult for universities to keep up with them, which is why most have created compliance offices.

College coaches are allowed to meet with high school coaches and athletic personnel at any time during the season, according to Clements to discuss certain players.

He described a technique used by many high school and college coaches when they’re visiting with a college recruiter: the bump.

“I [as a member of the high school athletic department] know that you [the high school player] are an office aide in sixth period in the main office,” Clements described a hypothetical situation.

“I’ve got the coach [of the visiting university] with me and we may walk down the hallway and ‘bump’ into you. I’m not calling you to my office and we aren’t all sitting down to have to talk, but this gives the coach a chance to introduce himself to you and a get a feel for how you are as a person.”

According to reports Lyles was taking the bump a step further. It appears that he was setting up meetings between players and those affiliated with certain universities.

As a former athlete, Jackson described the difficulties of having to know the endless rules of the NCAA.

“You don’t know who has your best interest at heart. Is there a list of boosters posted some place?” Jackson asked rhetorically.

“You don’t know who is who. You don’t know who has what kind of intentions. You don’t know the rules because there are bi-laws, parts 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s unrealistic. Kids aren’t going to carry a rule book and list of boosters in their back pocket.”

This is the type of pressure put on an 18-year-old young man as he makes one of the biggest decisions of his life: where to attend college. These players have coaches, boosters, agents and ‘friends’ who they think they can trust guiding them in a direction that is, at times, illegal.

And when a player is discovered to have received improper benefits it is almost always too late.

Take Bush for example. He was already no longer at USC. Bush was asked to return his Heisman Trophy and his former school is banned from the post-season for two years.

The school also loses more than 20 scholarships and is forced to vacate wins. So the question is: Who is affected by these strict sanctions? It hurts the school that the individual athlete is no longer attending

The recruiting process itself can be extremely drawn out, even longer than the high school season. The highly touted recruits are not necessarily discovered during live football games.

“It’s all about the summer camps and combines,” Tom Bergeron, editor at RivalsHigh.com which is one of the largest high school football databases online and portion of Yahoo! Sports briefly wrote in an email. “That’s where these kids are discovered.”

Clements saw this first-hand during offseason practices. “We had over 80 schools coming to some of our spring practices,” he said. “That’s great for the kids.”

While it is great exposure for the student-athletes, it is also very difficult for high school administrations to keep track of all of these scouts as they generally do not have compliance offices and a much smaller budget to track everyone who comes to look at the players.

“Spring practice was crazy,” one college football player said. “College coaches you know [the popular guys] are there. Coaches you don’t know are there. And fans/boosters of every major university are there. No one knows who is who and guys are just being told this and that.”

While this player claims he wasn’t offered benefits he spoke cautiously when saying he heard of other high school players being offered things, outside of a college scholarship.

“You would see guys go from talking to a college coach and then go talk to a booster or a ‘fan’ away from everyone else,” the anonymous college player said. “Later you would hear whispers in the locker room about this school offering someone this and that school offering something else. It ranged from cash, to free flights home [if the school was far away from family], to gifts, to just free things at local businesses.”

So how do we stop illegal recruiting? Jackson describes the difficulties in legally paying college football players.

“The NCAA makes a killing off these kids and they don’t get anything back in return,” Jackson said. “The problem is if you pay the college football players, then you have to pay all college athletes. Right now, there is not a way they can do that without making it fair across the board.”

The problem stated by Jackson is exactly why the NCAA will never pay student-athletes. Universities already have enough trouble keeping eligibility due to regulations such as Title IX, which basically ensures you have as many female athletes as male athletes competing at the collegiate level.

You won’t be able to pay players based on their performance; it would have to be even to every college athlete, regardless of sport so the NCAA feels that no one is getting an unfair advantage.

Illegal recruiting of high school athletes will always be an issue as long as the NFL has a free minor league system.

As long as athletes are putting their bodies on the line and not being compensated, they will always find a way to make some money.

Use baseball and the MLB as an example. If you’re a top player in high school then we can assume you have a number of college scholarship offers to continue playing baseball at the collegiate level.

The players then also enter the MLB draft and if they are drafted then meet with their agents to discuss a deal. If the MLB team makes an offer the players likes then he has the option to take the money and become a pro athlete or he can forego the money and enroll at college to fulfill his college scholarship.

As it stands now the NFL has a free minor league system. They pay no money to the NCAA, which in turn trains these athletes for at least three years before they enter the draft.

If the NFL would purchase the United Football League, Canadian Football League or the Arena Football League and use it as their minor league system then we would have no issues.

The athletes that want the money and have the talent to go pro out of high school would enter the draft and if a team makes a substantial offer to the player then he will have the option to go pro or attend college.

“The money is more than there,” Jackson ensured. “They just have to find a way to allocate it.”

Kyle Bennett can be reached at kbennett.ut@gmail.com.