What’s the underbelly of college sports look like? According to an anonymous survey of 20 high-profile basketball coaches done by ESPN.com, it’s filled with shady agents passing prepaid credit cards to star players, parents demanding payoffs for the chance to recruit their sons, and coaches willingly breaking NCAA rules to land prospects.
The biggest problem? Time away from campus during the summer recruiting period. “You walk into a living room and promise a mother that you’ll be there for her son,” one coach said. “And as soon as they get on campus, you’re gone.”
“If they do something stupid, I’m going to get fired,” another said, “but I can’t be there to see what they’re doing.”
Coaches detest the NCAA rule book but say it’s laughably easy to sidestep some of the rules, including the limit on recruiting calls. “Who gets caught with that anymore? It’s a joke,” one coach said. “They’re out there catching the guy with the one phone. How about the guy with two and three bat phones?”
One rule coaches find particularly galling: They can’t even say hello to potential recruits during the summer evaluation-only recruiting period. “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.”
But the NCAA’s female enforcement officers can’t see everything, and there’s a real paranoia that some coaches are following prospects or their coaches or parents into restrooms to broker deals.
“I’ve never won a recruit in the bathroom,” one coach said. “Maybe I need to pee more.”
As for the future, things don’t look so good: “I’m glad I’m not 40 and just getting started in this business,” one coach said. “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I would say I’m a little more pessimistic about things than I was a few years ago. It just seems like we can’t stop it. The bad guys keep winning.”
3 Responses to On Bat Phones, Backstabbing, and Other Grievances
rburns - July 23, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Basketball is the cesspool of college athletics. It’s always been a mystery to me how men (coaches) with no integrity and enormous egos needing constantly to be fed can say they “build character” in “student/athletes” who have exactly the same character flaws. That’s especially so now that one and out is the rule. But, hey, together the coaches and the players win games and isn’t that what is important to higher education? Just keep saying that and meaning that and the situation will get increasingly sordid for all concerned in all sports. Who can be surprised that with the criminal examples of football and basketball even women’s fieldhockey will follow that path to success? Once college athletics got to be big money it was natural that it would morph into a model for organized crime. We let it happen, we spend money to make it happen, and we cheer for the results, don’t we?
11159995 - July 23, 2010 at 5:41 pm
It seems abundantly clear from the quotations in this article that these college coaches have no respect for the institutions in which they work, and so long as they can produce winning records by whatever means possible, including skirting NCAA rules, that’s all that is important to them. It’s a sad state of affairs that college sports have declined to this level of crass commercialism, corrupting the values of the colleges they are supposed to be serving. Maybe it’s time to clean house entirely and get rid of big-time college sports competition. Let the NFL and NBA set up farm teams where these players can get trained for the pros. Why should colleges accept that role any longer? — Sandy Thatcher
droslovinia - July 23, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Are you seriously suggesting that Basketball is the only sport where this kind of thing goes on? Are you seriously suggesting that coaches work primarily for their schools? Have you ever seen a “big-time” college coach’s sources of income? Are you seriously suggesting that schools are going to walk away from the billions of dollars the NCAA and its minions are tossing around? Yes, the concept of truly “college” sports, especially among large schools, is laughable these days, but all this high-minded talk of “crass commercialism corrupting the values..” and whatnot is equally laughable.