Calls can be costly, but it's not all black and white
Kelvin Sampson famously lost the Indiana job because of them, Jim Calhoun's staff at Connecticut suffered casualties because of them and now Tennessee basketball is the subject of an NCAA investigation that has uncovered an untold amount of them, too. Impermissible phone calls are all the rage in this era of college basketball, but why?
That's the question I attempted to answer after Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton held a press conference Friday to announce that his men's basketball program has received an NCAA letter of inquiry thanks, at least in part, to impermissible calls. I reached out to 10 coaches from eight different conferences and offered complete anonymity in exchange for total honesty.
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| Bruce Pearl's program is the latest to have its phone records come under NCAA scrutiny. (Getty Images) |
"Yes," answered the first coach on my list. "Any coach who tells you he hasn't is lying. We've all done it. You don't need to interview coaches to get that answer."
Turns out, that's true. All 10 coaches I spoke with acknowledged making impermissible phone calls. Some said they had done it a few times, others often. But nobody claimed innocence, and every one of them said they didn't know anybody who could. The only debate was whether the illegal calls are more often a sign of confusion or intentional cheating. One coach said the number of them typically tells the story.
"There's a difference between 15 and 200," he said. "It might be accidental if you make 15 impermissible calls over a two-year period, but you can't accidentally make 200; that's cheating. There's no way the gray area leads to 200."
To understand the gray area you must first understand that coaches are only allowed to call prospects once a month starting June 15 before their junior years, then twice a week starting August 1 after their junior years. It's also important to note that calling a prospect's family member is the same as calling a prospect. There are also guidelines that make it improper to call prospects while they're at sanctioned summer events. So some impermissible calls, the coaches said, are rooted in calendar confusion and can be unavoidable.
"Let's say there's a kid I'm recruiting who's scheduled to play in an AAU event, go home for a day, then play in another AAU event," said one coach, citing just one example of how an impermissible call might get made. "I can't call while he's at either event, but I can call while he's home. So on the day that he's scheduled to be home, I call his cell phone. But what if his team decided at the last minute to go straight from the first event to the second event without going home? Now I've just made an impermissible call, and it was unavoidable."
That's why there's a difference between 15 and 200.
Even a by-the-book coach can compile impermissible calls that way.
"There is some gray area that absolutely exists," said one coach. "Calls that fall in that category should be excused."
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But there's no way to excuse or spin a truly excessive number of violations, and that's what I was really interested in understanding, the answer to the following question: Why is an excessive number of impermissible calls ever made?
The most common answer: Fear.
"So much of it is done out of fear," one coach said. "The fear of losing ground, losing traction."
The majority of coaches said they don't make impermissible calls to gain an advantage as much as they make them out of paranoia that they're operating at a disadvantage if they don't. In that way, impermissible calls are a lot like steroid use in baseball, which is to say a part of the culture and something that's rationalized because everybody assumes everybody else is doing it. Of course, the reason everybody assumes everybody else is doing it is because almost everybody else is doing it.
Take this story, for instance: "We're recruiting a kid right now, a pretty high-level kid, and I've been told a coach we're recruiting against calls the kid's brother every single day, and so my understanding is that the brother is in that school's camp," one coach said. "So let's say I'm recruiting a kid whose parents are divorced. There's a mother in one place, a father in another, an older brother who played college ball and wants to be part of the process, and a grandfather who lives in my city, which is why I started recruiting the kid in the first place. I get two calls a week. If I call the kid and the mother, that's it. If I call the kid and the father, that's it. So I might go three weeks without calling everybody I need to call if I play it by the rules, and then there's another coach calling the brother every day. What am I supposed to do?"
Either fall behind or ...
"Start making the calls," one coach said. "You can't lose an edge."
That said, the majority -- not all, but the majority -- of coaches I spoke with insisted that though they've made and do make impermissible calls out of fear of losing traction with a prospect, they don't actually believe calls are the determining factor in any recruitment. Most think calls create advantages or cause disadvantages early, but that by the end of the process -- once the recruit and his family members are made aware of why you might not call as much as others -- calls tend to be of little importance.
"I had a brother tell me one time that Coach X was outworking me, and I took offense to that," said one coach. "So I said, 'Really? How?' And the brother told me Coach X was calling every day. I just said, 'Well, you know that's illegal, don't you?' So I do think it matters early when you're trying to make yourself known, and it can matter with a family member or the people around a prospect because it never hurts to develop a great relationship with a person of influence who might be helping or hurting you when it comes decision time. But do phone calls ever really dictate where a prospect signs? In most cases, no."
That was the common opinion.
In the grand scheme of things, calls don't really matter.
"I've recruited McDonald's All-Americans, future draft picks, recruited at every level, and the sad part is that at the end of the day I don't think phone calls even matter," another coach said. "In the big picture, do phone calls really make much of a difference in whether you get or don't get a kid? I'm saying unequivocally that they do not."
But coaches still make them anyway.
They still risk their jobs because of them anyway.
"It happens," one coach said. "And it's sad, isn't it?"
