You are here: Home / Archives for enforcement

Is the Era of the “Compliance Office” on the Way Out?

July 19, 2011 by

Tony Barnhart of CBSSports.com has some strong words for athletic directors. The new boss might be the same as the old boss but that boss is singing a different tune, and not a happy one for schools who want to gain and edge or find a shortcut. In response, Mr. Barnhart has a couple of suggestions.

2. Search for the biggest, brightest and toughest legal mind you can find and make that person your NCAA compliance director. The compliance director has one job and that’s to protect the institution (and the athletic director). If that person is doing his/her job correctly, they will be the most disliked person in the department (next to you, of course).

Setting aside the questions marks of turning compliance into an extension of the legal profession, this is a major rethinking of the role of the compliance office. It’s not a new idea though. The Committee on Infractions has scrutinized the relationship between compliance office and coaches as compliance tries to strike the balance between cops and partners. The COI has questioned the tactic of working with coaches even during investigations, although most campus compliance staff would claim this is unworkable.

Mr. Barnhart goes one step further though with a stern message to athletic directors about the culture that needs to be the foundation for this new attitude toward compliance:

3. Meet with your coaches once a week and always end the meeting with these two statements:

“If you have a problem with the compliance director you come to me. If you do not cooperate with the compliance director you are done. If you try to intimidate the compliance director you’re done. I don’t care how much money you make or how many games you’ve won. The president of this university has my back on this.

“If you get even a whiff that a rule has been broken, walk down the hall to the compliance director and dump it in their lap. If you cover anything up, you’re done.”

Take the two suggestions together and the loyalties and function of the compliance office are clear. It’s no longer a compliance office, it’s an enforcement office. Its job is not to work with coaches, but keep them in line. It seeks to protect itself, the institution and the athletic director first, and the coaches last. Such a set up also raises the suspicion that some coaches have of compliance becoming a tool for athletic directors to force them out. In short, the relationship between this office and coaches will be more adversarial than cooperative.

So what happens to all the other parts of compliance? Who works on the waivers? Who tracks eligibility? Who fights with the NCAA and the conference to get the interp that helps the program? Who in the athletic department will ever work for a student-athlete rather than just keeping tabs on them?

The answer seems simple: to make Mr. Barnhart’s vision of the “New World Order” work, the compliance office has to break apart. What Mr. Barnhart calls a compliance office would be an enforcement office. Just like in the NCAA national office, other functions like eligibility, interpretations, and waivers would be handled by one or more different offices, all reporting to the athletic director. The enforcement office would monitor the rest of what was the compliance office just like it monitors the coaching staffs. Watchers watching the watchers if you will.

Coaches need a compliance office they can have a cooperative working relationship with. They need someone in the athletic department they can trust to help them be successful on the field. A more proactive NCAA enforcement staff may mean those people cannot be the same people who monitor those coaches. In that case, it may be time to take a page from the national office and create different offices to do different jobs.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Enforcement Reform Through the Years

June 21, 2011 by

In 1985 the Division I membership held a special convention to address rampant rule breaking, an idea gaining traction today. That convention lead to increased penalties and a crackdown highlighted by Southern Methodist University receiving the new “death penalty.”

But pendulums swing and after a rash of lawsuits focused on the enforcement process, particularly the major infractions process, the NCAA created a Special Review Committee chaired by former Solicitor General and BYU President Rex Lee. The Lee Committee, as it came to be known, suggested sweeping change in the enforcement process including:

  • In-person delivery of Notice of Inquiry;
  • Tape recording of all interviews with tapes provided to all parties;
  • Creation of a summary disposition procedure;
  • Initial hearing of factual disputes by an independent hearing officer with penalties imposed by the Committee on Infractions;
  • Public access to at least some portion of the hearings;
  • Appeal of penalties to a special committee;
  • Public transcripts of hearings;
  • Public explanation of actions taken regarding the infractions.

Many were adopted, including the creation of the Notice of Inquiry (although not hand-delivered), establishment of the summary disposition procedure, establishment of the Infractions Appeals Committee, and more detailed reporting of COI actions. But the two biggest recommendations, independent hearing officers and opening of hearings have not been adopted.

That list comes from the record of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Due Process and the NCAA.” Shortly after that hearing, the national office underwent a series of reviews that culminated in over 50 recommendations from James C. Duff, the Director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts. Duff’s recommendations centered around two major areas, increased enforcement and increased efficiency, and included:

  • Hiring more staff, including a “reporter of decisions” to review infractions-related information before it was released to the public;
  • Requiring individuals to appear before the COI to have a right to an appeal hearing;
  • Allowing institutions to submit new information for reconsideration before appeal;
  • Allowing schools to stipulate facts and procedural issues; and
  • Public responses to statements made by involved institutions and individuals.

These recommendations were all adopted. In fact, submitting information to have a case reconsidered became so prevalent that it was later limited. Institutions were pushing through incomplete cases or holding back information in case it was necessary. Now additional information can only be submitted if it was not and could not have been discovered before the case was submitted.

More recently, Gene Marsh, former member and chair of the COI, published a law review article in 2009 calling for two major changes to the Committee on Infractions. One was a variation on an old theme: increasing the number of public members from two to four. The other was brand new: having committee members write dissenting opinions in cases where the decision was not unanimous.

Finally, the Board of Directors made procedural changes designed to clarify the roles of the involved parties. The changes are primarily designed to ensure a through understanding of the current process. That is backed up by the Enforcement Experience, so that media members would gain a better understanding of the process.

If you believe the enforcement process to be broken, it’s a discouraging story. What starts as a call for sweeping change has become a series of procedural refinements. If you believe the process works, then it’s an encouraging list. A basically working system is being refined to make it more efficient.

Of all the reform plans, Marsh’s strikes an attractive compromise. It increases the independent voice and public oversight on the committee while not taking decisions completely out of the membership’s hands. I doubt many dissenting opinions would be issued, but the possibility would require the committee to refine their reasoning and possibly even challenge their factual judgments.

The biggest lesson though is that ideas to reform the enforcement process are nothing new. Since modern enforcement of NCAA rules began at that special convention in 1985, the process has undergone numerous calls for change. And while not all of those calls have been heeded, the process has been updated almost as often.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Fail Better

May 13, 2011 by

The NCAA’s Enforcement Experience seems to have been a big success. If the intent was to open up the infractions process enough that we can move beyond problems that aren’t actually there to the ones that are, job well done. Already you can see it in the quality and specificity of some of the recommendations made by the attendees. Mike DeCourcy recommends penalties carefully crafted to the sport to improve effectiveness. Stuart Mandel approved of President Emmert’s suggestion of new divisions between the types of violations, and offered the idea of a “czar of discipline”

Everyone has ideas about how enforcement should work, ideas that are hopefully better now after the NCAA offered a glimpse into how it works right now. But I’m not interested in how enforcement works. I’m interested in what happens when it doesn’t.

Consider the criminal justice system. The American criminal justice system is based on a few bedrock principles, one of which is that someone accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. That doesn’t mean much when the criminal justice system works. Given good police work, diligent prosecutors, competent defense, and a fair judge and jury, the truth generally comes out.

The presumption of innocence comes into play at the margins, where the system breaks down. When a prosecutor can’t prove conclusively that someone committed a crime, nor can the defense prove conclusively that the defendant is innocent. In those cases, the presumption of innocence says the defendant walks. If a defendant can find a technicality, he or she walks. If a defendant chooses to put up no proof of their innocence and the prosecutor cannot prove guilt, the defendant walks.

A lot of NCAA reform ideas focus on how enforcement (or student-athlete reinstatement, amateurism, academic eligibility, financial aid, etc.) should work when it’s working. And certainly there are areas of the NCAA that were poorly designed. Or to put it another way, even when they are working properly, they don’t work the way we want them too. But more often than not NCAA regulations and processes silently do what they were designed to do.

It’s when NCAA enforcement breaks that you hear about. When an investigation takes too long, when a penalty seems too severe or too lenient, when one school is treated differently than another school. And that’s where the toughest questions are when talking about improving the enforcement process. Whether you think about this as an engineering challenge or a philosophical problem, this is the toughest hurdle a reform idea has to get over.
Take for instance the cases where the circumstantial evidence is strong, but the witness is unreliable and there’s no smoking gun. When there’s a tie like this, the system is going to have to pick a winner.

This is not a binary choice. You could create a lesser charge, almost like an appearance or impropriety. Or you could continue the current practice: entrust a group of people to use their best judgement. By this point it is clear that many people have a problem with that sort of system.

But it’s not that such a system always fails or never works. Just what when it fails, it fails spectacularly. The engine seizes up, smoke billows out, and major repairs are necessary. Instead of shrugging it off as one of those things that happens, it becomes a major catasrophe.

The surest bet I can make about the NCAA’s enforcement procedure, no matter what reforms or improvements are made, is that it will break. The second surest bet I can make is that the closer to perfect we think the process is, the more shocking that failure will be. Unless we’re ready for it and we know what’s going to happen when enforcement breaks down.

That involves making hard choices. It may mean saying “If you can break this, you win” or “If this breaks, tough luck, you lose.” But failure has to be the starting point, not the afterthought. Before you explain how the NCAA enforcement process should work, you first have to explain how to get through the times when it doesn’t.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

The Third Path

April 2, 2011 by

The line between secondary and major violations has been getting fuzzier for quite some time. No longer does a major violation mean that you did something intentionally wrong or violated a bedrock principle of the NCAAa. It’s possible to be cited for a major violation through mere sloppiness or by forgetting-albeit repeatedly-one of the NCAA Manual’s many technical and often confusing rules.

So it does seem like there needs to be a new type of infraction. Something between a protracted and stigmatizing major infractions case and a secondary violation that is often never even discovered by the outside world.

There are actually three types of violations already though. There are secondary violations, there are full-on major violation, and then there are major violations that use summary disposition. A summary disposition case comes with all the stigma of commiting a major violation, but without a hearing. They also take substantially less time and cost less as well.

Rather than distinct forms of violations, what’s needed is for the NCAA process to match what the NCAA says about cases. Each is unique and it’s hard to pigeonhole cases into categories where they can be compared against each other. While there will still be steps, cases could move more smoothly from honest mistake to the death penalty with relatively minor changes to the enforcement process.

By allowing the enforcement staff to apply the two penalties seen in virtually every major infractions case-public reprimand and censure and probation-in severe secondary cases, there would be a much greater stigma to violations generally. The biggest thing that seperates major and secondary cases is that the NCAA announces major cases. Having a penalty of public reprimand and censure for at least some secondary violations would mean a coach’s good name is at stake in any case.

If public reprimand and censure is to scare potential rulebreakers, probation would help bring some violators back to the right path. By requring schools to improve monitoring early on and report on their progress to the NCAA, perhaps some petty criminals never become felons. And it could be cheaper for schools too. Small upgrades are normally less costly than a complete overhaul.

A new enforcement process alone will not eliminate all bad behavior from college athletics. But also neither will a set of new and tougher penalties if the process is broken. The penalties and the process need to be tailored for both the type of behavior we’re looking to end and the strengths and limitations of the NCAA when it comes to rules enforcement.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

What Kanter Case Means Going Forward

January 15, 2011 by

At the NCAA Convention in San Antonio yesterday, President Mark Emmert discussed specifics about two issues he expects the NCAA Membership to take up in the near future. First, how to strength the bylaws in response to the Cam Newton case:

“It’s wrong for parents to sell the athletic services of their student athletes to a university, and we need to make sure that we have rules to stop that problem,” Emmert said. “And today we don’t. We have to fix that. Student athletes trading on their standing as star student athletes for money or benefits is not acceptable, and we need to address it and make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Second, President Emmert addressed a need for greater transparency in the reinstatement process, specifically as it relates to football and bowl games.

Emmert said the NCAA needs to review and make public who gets to play in bowl games when violations occur.

Another recent case, Enes Kanter’s permanent ineligibility, raises three issues that the membership should look at as well: penalties for some amateurism violations, the responsibility toward international prospects, and the nature of case precedent.

Considering that the NCAA now permits participation with professional teams, violations where compensation exceeds expenses are likely to be more common. In addition, the violations are likely to be the only violation, not layered on top of professional participation and delayed enrollment violations like many of the current cases. So its reasonable to ask if minimal expenses should result in permanently ineligibility or even significant penalties.

Any penalty structure the Division I membership is going to come up with would not help Enes Kanter. It would say “$X and above: eligibility not reinstated” and $X will be well below $33,000. But avoiding the potential nightmare “pocket money” scenario is not only a good idea but also can be done without allowing ex-professionals a path back to Division I eligibility.

Just as it’s important to not blame the NCAA for things that it isn’t responsible for, it’s important to not give credit to the NCAA for things it didn’t intend to do. Proposal 2009-22 never intended to help international student-athletes get eligible. Proposal 2009-22 recognized that you could no longer be sure that participation on a professional team was voluntary.

The NCAA membership has zero responsibility to accommodate international youth development systems. The responsibility is to not close our eyes to international youth sports and use it as evidence of whether the assumptions the NCAA regulations are based on are valid. Nothing has shown yet that receiving money is an involuntary act and thus should not be an amateurism violation.

Finally the University of Kentucky has raised significant concerns about how case precedent is handled. Specifically, the case has raised questions about how broadly high-profile and/or difficult cases can be interpreted as controlling on future cases. The current system right now requires a sort of critical mass. One case might not good as precedent, but multiple cases with roughly the same facts eventually start controlling cases more closely.

It’s something the membership should review, but I’m not sure there’s a better solution. If all cases gain value as precedent, expect slower and more complicated rulings that punish student-athletes more harshly. The Committee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement will be wary about opening a bunch of Pandora’s boxes. On the other hand, no precedent means the Committee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement would have to republish the guidelines constantly. There would be no natural evolution of the reinstatement process, only a step-by-step process when the membership is absolutely certain it wants to take the next step.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , , , ,

On Consistency

December 31, 2010 by

Consistency. It’s the current buzzword regarding how the NCAA regulates college athletics. All anyone wants is consistency in the NCAA’s decisions.

Let’s ignore for a moment that consistency can easily be used as a substitute for “do what I want you to do.” Someone takes two decisions with different outcomes, and demands consistency, but often suggesting one is right and the other is incorrect. If consistency was most important, either decision could be “correct” as long as both are the same.

But consistency can mean many things. A simple demand of the NCAA to be more consistent is no different then simply demanding that the NCAA “do better” with no other direction. So let’s refine our demands for consistency.

The most important consistency is consistency with the rules
Decisions should be based on rules and processes. If your options are to have two similar decisions or have two decisions that are based in the rules, the latter is always better. That means technicalities happen. That means that different rules produce different outcomes even from seemingly (but not quite) similar situations.

Take the recently announced Ohio State suspensions, derided as inconsistent. Say what you will about the decision, but the NCAA followed its own rules:

  • The student-athletes were given withholding conditions in line with the reinstatement guidelines;
  • Some student-athletes were given additional withholdings based on a published bylaw;
  • And the student-athletes met the requirements in a policies and procedures manual to have the withholdings delayed.

If you disagree with the process that produced that decision, that’s fair. But that doesn’t mean the process should be abandoned in a given case to reach the desired result.

The second most important consistency is consistency across facts
Assuming the processes are followed, we would like to know that similar situations produce similar results. The exact same situation should always produce the exact same result under the rule above. But the more similar two sets of facts are, the more similar the decisions should be.

Consider Enes Kanter and Josh Selby. The cases are similar because the two took impermissible benefits or compensation prior to enrolling in college. But there’s also two differences in the cases:

  • The source of the benefit; and
  • The amount of the benefit.

If you agree that the NCAA should follow their own rules, those rules state that those two differences matter. We can debate how much they should matter, if at all. But because the facts are different in some material way (according to the current rules), different decisions in the two cases would not necessarily be inconsistent.

The third most important consistency is consistency with morality
Which is worse behavior? A father attempting but failing to secure hundreds of thousands of dollars for his son to attend a specific school? Or a coach mistakenly providing money to someone with influence over a prospect? The NCAA regulations said the latter. Public opinion appears to be the former.

Prior to this year, that would have been a great theoretical debate. Now it’s two actual decisions that lead (or didn’t) to actual penalties.

Here’s where the greatest criticism of the NCAA regulations can be levied. Behavior that appears in some cases to not be “as bad” leads to more penalties than behavior that appears to be “worse”.

I’m not confirming some big conspiracy theory though. That’s a common result of trying to corral as many consituencies over as many years as the NCAA regulations have been growing. As someone who participates in the NCAA’s legislative process, I’m as frustrated as anyone else when we deregulate part of one area but not the entire concept. Or increase regulation in one area but deregulate in what appears to be a similar area.

But the NCAA membership cannot fix these problems by adopting this bylaw:

Bylaw 4.01.1.1 – No Conspiracies
The Association shall not operate in a manner that appears to be similar to a cartel, cabal, or other shadowy organization (Adopted: 12/30/10)

The idea of a sort of constitutional convention has merit. It would be a lot more productive but a lot less exciting than an inquisition.

Consistency doesn’t equal perfection
Any sort of system of regulation that seeks to produce decisions that are consistent with its rules and based on facts is going to get it wrong sometimes. If the attitude is “student-athlete friendly,” some wrongdoers are going to get off easy. If the goal is to clean up a sport or area of the rules, someone who just made a mistake might get caught on a technicality.

Whether the NCAA membership goes to one extreme or the other or somewhere in the middle, there’s a trade-off. We can’t have blanket rules without the blanket covering people it shouldn’t. And we can’t have a million exceptions without creating loopholes for ne’er-do-wells.

The charge is that far from being perfect, the NCAA is more often than not wrong. This year at least, that judgment is being made based on comparing the same set of five or six cases over and over against each other. But since August 1, 2010, the NCAA has issued over 1500 decisions in secondary violation and/or student-athlete reinstatement cases.

It’s a combination of small sample size and what’s available to be compared. The cases that get talked about are unusual or controversial decisions in two of the NCAA’s 30+ sports. Assuming the other 1490-odd cases are “right,” the attention and the difficulties are all focused on the same place: at the margins. This isn’t a fundamental failure of the NCAA model. It’s a debate about how to handle the most difficult and exceptional cases.

Say what you mean
The truest thing to say about consistency in the NCAA is that there’s more consistency in the decisions than people think and less consistency in the rules than anyone would say is ideal. But as long as the criticism is vague demands for “consistency” or “fairness”, it’s hard for any change to occur.

If your demand is for more consistency, narrow it down. Does the NCAA not follow its own rules? Are the rules focused on the wrong priorities? Is the enforcement/reinstatement process not good enough at determining relevant facts? Those are all things that can be improved, measures that can be used to determine success or failure. A simple demand for “consistency” isn’t likely to lead to anything.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Cut Out The Middlemen, Not July

October 27, 2010 by

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Somewhere along the way, the two July evaluation periods became the epitome of everything that was wrong with college basketball recruiting. Perhaps it was the anecdotes of coaches signing 11 month leases on apartments and then spending an entire month on the road recruiting. Perhaps it’s the fact that the entire evaluation period is solely focused on AAU basketball, which gets the somewhat negative moniker of “nonscholastic” in the NCAA Manual. Whatever the reason, the popular image of July is that it’s the Wild West, an unregulated feeding frenzy of coaches looking for players and any number of people looking to profit off that fact.

In reality, the July evaluation periods in men’s basketball are the most structured and heavily regulated periods in the entire recruiting landscape. While college coaches may attend open gyms at high schools, the vast majority of evaluation takes place at certified events. Certified events must register with the NCAA and meet the lengthy list of 17 requirements in NCAA Bylaw 13.18 covering topics from the price of event packets to when games can start. Not to mention they are some of the only recruiting periods that is monitored in person by members of the enforcement staff, who are making their presence felt:

“We have the NCAA gestapettes around here like World Cup officials,” one coach said, referring to the NCAA representatives — most of whom are women — who monitor the summer circuit. “You smile at a kid, they give you a yellow card. Do it twice, it’s a red card and you’re off the road.”

While that comment shows that the Basketball Focus Group has a great deal of work to do in their primary goal (building a healthy respect for the enforcement process), it’s a start that would not be possible during any of the other recruiting periods on the men’s basketball calendar.

The impetus behind ending July recruiting has little to do with what actually happens in July (largely a bunch of coaches cordoned off in little pens watching games for 12 hours a day) and more what the rising importance of the July recruiting period represents: the growing influence in the recruiting process of third parties not tied to educational institutions.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the best way to reduce the influence of corrupt AAU coaches, agents, handlers, trainers, runners, and other intermediaries is to provide coaches with more direct access to these events. The best evaluations are ones untainted by someone else’s subjective opinions or underhanded motives. Prevent coaches from evaluating first hand at July events and the events will still go on, the evaluations will just be placed in the hands of the same people above whose power in the recruiting process the Collegiate Commissioners Association is looking to reduce.

The same goes for contacts and communication. I’m not a college basketball recruiting expert but I have to believe that one of the most valuable opportunities a coach can get is a chance to sell a prospect on his program without another voice whispering in the prospect’s ear.

The trouble with the basketball recruiting model as it stands now is that it exists in limbo between the tightly controlled football recruiting rules and the looser rules that apply to other sports. Rather than crafting a new model, the basketball recruiting calendar seems to be an evolution of the other sports, with fewer contact/evaluation periods and a second limit (recruiting person-days) imposed to contain costs. To that was later added a ban on attending nonscholastic events during the academic year.

If you start with the premise that the July recruiting period works rather than fails, the path to a new basketball recruiting model seems clear. Three major evaluation periods (roughly late-September/early-October, mid-April, and July) outside of the basketball season where attendance at nonscholastic events is permitted. A smaller number of evaluation days for use during the season to scout high school games. And removal of off-campus contacts from counting against the use of off-campus recruiting days.

Such a model would move most of the in-person evaluation of prospects to outside of the periods where coaches are needed on campus most (finals and the basketball season). It would provide coaches with increased direct contact with prospects. It would give coaches direct access to cost-effective AAU tournaments that have continued to exist despite the lack of college coaches in attendance. And it would expand the opportunity for in-person monitoring by the Basketball Focus Group during periods of intense recruiting.

While the model proposed by Santa Clara head coach Kerry Keating has merit, it would be a large step in the other direction. With expanded evaluation and contact periods and more freedom to use recruiting person-days, it would spread recruiting so wide and far that the ability of institutions and the NCAA to monitor what is happening in gyms would be severely reduced. Not to mention that it would be hurt by the idea floated by the recruiting cabinet in some potential recruiting models (pdf) to abolish the annual limit on evaluations of one prospect. It’s not hard to imagine burnt-out coaches spending a large chunk of their recruiting days evaluating—or more accurately babysitting—committed prospects.

The core of Coach Keating’s plan—evaluation of prospects based on institutional discretion—could be accomplished through a different bit of deregulation, allowing coaches to watch any video of a prospect they can get their hands on. Specifically, changing this interpretation from April 29, 2009:

The academic and membership affairs staff determined that it is not permissible for an institution to obtain video (e.g., live streaming video, recorded video) of any nonscholastic activities, including regular game and all-star competition, or any summer camp or clinic competition, through a subscription fee or other associated fee paid to a recruiting or scouting service.  Further, it is not permissible to obtain any nonscholastic video that is available only to a select group of individuals (e.g., coaches), even if there is no charge associated with such individuals accessing the video.

That would open up coaches to view any video of prospects playing in any sort of game at any time. There would be one issue to be sorted out: who would provide the video of prospects? Eliminating or changing this interpretation would create a market for another middleman. If that middleman is a legitimate business providing a needed service, there are few worries. However, if it became another tool for handlers of prospects to charge a price of admission for access to a prospect, it could exacerbate the current problems. Done right thought, it allows for more evaluation of prospects without the costs (both monetary and otherwise) of having coaches on the road throughout the year.

The problem with the July recruiting period has little to do with those 20 days themselves. Rather, the problem is what the focus on those 20 days allows to happen during the other 345. The idea of eliminating the July recruiting period is not without merit, especially as the membership considers the possibility of summer practice in men’s basketball. But it’s just as likely to exacerbate the problems in men’s basketball recruiting as it is to solve any of them.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , , ,

Copyright �© 2010-2012 NCAA �·