John Barr and Lindsay Rovegno, writing for ESPN.com, look at the out of whack world of college recruiting.
For thousands of college coaches across the country, text messaging has become a routine part of the recruiting process, providing instant access to prospects with just a few short lines.He was embarrassed that he ONLY had five! The next thing you know, Rivals will be ranking the recruits by text message numbers instead of stars. Yup, that kid is a 20 message per day playuh!
While text messaging recruits is a painless process for coaches, some feel the overwhelming number of text messages recruits are receiving is bordering on intrusive. Kosta Koufos, a 7-foot-1 center, ranked as one of the top-10 basketball recruits in his class, has been on the receiving end of plenty of text messages. He said he gets about 20 every day.
"During school I get them all the time, so I gotta keep my phone on vibrate," Koufos chuckles. "I had a couple incidents where it went off and I got a little bit in trouble."
Arrelious Benn, ranked as a top wide receiver in his age group, checked his cell phone after a recent weight training and sprint workout and noticed he had five text messages waiting for him, all from college coaches. He quickly noted that number is a little lower than normal.
The NCAA now finds itself questioning the original ruling on text messaging, wondering if the regulations that were created to protect recruits, are in fact invading their privacy.Is it just me or do we make things more difficult on purpose? Limit the number of text messages you can send to a recruit, limit it to non-school hours, and forbid it before their senior year. And, if you really are concerned about privacy, allow the recruit the option of not being texted if he/she chooses. I know, I know. How can they monitor and control that? How do they do it now? How many times has JoePa called someone? Or Carroll? Or Brown? Someone must be keeping track of those things. You just apply the same monitors and stiff penalties if someone breaks the rules.
But the NCAA may have bigger concerns than the excessive number of text messages some prospects are receiving on a daily basis. Under NCAA rules, college coaches cannot initiate contact of any kind with high school freshmen and sophomores, and are extremely limited in the amount of times they can phone high school players before their senior season. But under the current regulations, text messaging is not considered a phone call.
Benn specifically told us he received text messages on several occasions from Penn State, Virginia, and Maryland as a sophomore. While Virginia and Penn State denied any improper activity regarding Benn's recruitment, a Maryland associate athletic director told us she's "spoken with the coaches involved with the recruitment of this young man. Each indicated they had not contacted Arrelious Benn at an inappropriate time." Shortly after ESPN asked the schools about potential violations related to text messaging, Benn contacted us and changed his story saying he was never text messaged by those schools as a sophomore.
ESPN also found evidence of coaches using text messages as a loophole to get around the restrictions on calling recruits. Coaches are essentially using text messages to lure recruits into calling them. While coaches are extremely limited in the amount of times they can call high school recruits, there's no limit to the number of times high school recruits can phone college coaches. Koufos said that about 50 percent of the text messages he receives include the words "Give me a call."
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