Pick any day of the week, and you can find a gazillion coaches fired up about the recruiting deregulation initiative that would allow unlimited texting to recruits -- the Wild, Wild West, as colleague Dennis Dodd puts it.
To capture the potential insanity of the anything-goes mentality, one head coach from a BCS school told me he heard from an SEC school planning to hire staffers to do one thing -- text top recruits 100-150 times per day. Based on what I've gathered, that school is not Alabama, which might have enough built-in clout to pass on the minute-by-minute adulation.
Schools clearly must make judgment calls on which recruits love the attention and which will simply turn their cell phones off and take you off their list of favorites if you're overbearing.
The Big 12 has not yet taken a stand on the issue. Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said his office has heard from members: Some intend to request an override; others have said "we're fine with it." League officials will meet Friday, and deregulation is among the chief issues under discussion.
This is a different tone from the Big Ten's unified opposition of the ruling. NCAA vice president of Division I David Berst told USA Today the recruiting plan might be modified.
"There's an opportunity to manage it on an institution basis," Bowlsby said. "The pressure from coaches saying, 'They are doing this down the road; why can’t we do it?' It’s a different set of friction points. There’s a lot of positive to come from deregulation."
