The Sports Brewery

NCAA Banning Schools From Using Recruiting Sites

Posted on 08. Apr, 2011 at 12:31 pm by Braga in NCAA Football, Recruiting

The NCAA announced today that college football programs will no longer be allowed to subscribe to recruiting services such as Rivals.com or Scout.com and would be forced to declare it as a secondary violation if they did.

In fact, every school in the country that has ever used any of these services (read: all of them) had to report that violation today as a result of the announcement.

The decision classifies those Web sites as scouting services and not media organizations, and it states that the content they provide football programs with is different than what the general public can pay for.

A yearly subscription to Rivals.com costs the average person $99.95, while many schools pay anywhere between $1,000-5,000 annually.

The average person gets access to videos, forums, and detailed information about every recruit on the site, but it’s clear that schools get a lot more personalized and in-depth information.

This is the crux of the NCAA’s decision today. They want to eliminate that difference, and the only way they can monitor that is to ban the schools from using the services outright.

Also an issue is that Rivals.com and other sites like it have specialized subsites for each school. Oregon’s on Rivals.com is Duck Sports Authority. Those sites sometimes give information to Oregon, for example, that other schools aren’t privy to.

For example: if a kid were leaning towards a school because his coach has a friend there, and Chip Kelly used that to his advantage, then he’s using information not available to not only the general public, but any other school in the country as well.

What this seems to be is the NCAA finally finding something tangible it can control. While it can’t control Rivals.com in any way, it can monitor — or at least look like it is to the general public — the Web sites coaches look at to make sure they aren’t receiving any sort of advantage.

What’s to prevent a coach from looking at Rivals.com at home on his laptop? Nothing. But if the NCAA limits his interactions with the company it will eliminate any advantage a coach could get over anyone else. And if it comes out that a coach even looked at the site then it’s an immediate violation. No grey area.

But what’s wrong with the coach getting an advantage over Joe Schmoe? Clearly they’re paying the Web site for their services, so shouldn’t they still get the stuff they clearly overpay for?

What the NCAA should do, before it does anything else, is define what a recruiting service is. The schools pay a ton of money for information about players. When did this become a problem? Obviously a service can’t have any interaction with the players’ decisions, but why is the NCAA cracking down on information gathering Web sites?

The main problem I have with this is that it eliminates the legitimate, above-board services from the equation and only leaves schools with the ability to interact with the recruiting services not available to the general public, the ones bringing up all the issues in the first place.

Instead of being able to use the easy-to-monitor Web sites kept in check by thousands of subscribers, the schools are now limited to using guys like he-who-must-not-be-named.

Clearly these Web sites and their interactions with teams is the easiest to gather information about, so this is an obvious first step for the NCAA in cracking down on improper recruiting.

The issue will be what happens when they crack down on the dirty ones. The problem with separating the good services from these coaches is that when the dust settles there might not be anyone left to get information from.

My prediction: that the NCAA eventually overturns this after realizing that 24/7 Sports, Rivals, Scout and ESPN are some of the few clean recruiting services in the country available to coaches.

Tags: Alex Braga, ESPN, NCAA, Rivals, Scout