Coaches divided on how to fix broken recruiting system
NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. -- There is anticipated, expected change coming in 2012 to the college basketball recruiting calendar. What percentage of coaches will be satisfied with the changes? That's unknown because the solution is unknown right now.
And there we have our problem. Every July, the college basketball community gets the unwanted opportunity/ritual: Gab about three endless issues with the sport. The recruiting calendar, NCAA rules irregularities and archaisms and the shady nature of characters around the game get hours upon hours of conversation each summer. Sure, toss in your current event du jour depending on the year, but the former three topics will always be in play and symbolically hanging over the sport.
It's an endless cycle. But we're coming up on the newest iteration of a recruiting calendar revamp, and coaches have plenty of thoughts to share about what the best model should be.
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Baylor assistant Paul Mills, who is the Big 12 representative on the assistant coaches' National Association of Basketball Coaches board of directors, wants less compression. That's about the only issue every coach can agree on: the 20-day July period can't continue.
Coaches and players are mentally, physically, and spiritually tired by the final five days. It's largely considered a waste. This is the most effective way to recruit? Absolutely not. More than 450 transfers from last season prove the sport has decay from the inside, and recruiting is a significant factor. Many believe this condensed, hodgepodge period of recruiting is the primary culprit.
"We don't need the whole months -- just a couple of weekends," Mississippi State's Rick Stansbury said. "The model, as it's being talked about, is to cut back July some. Cut back the 10-day [periods] to six days. Most of us can live with that. It gives us more time back at home with our team in the summertime."
It's funny how quickly coaches forget, though. Remember the panic last October when the NCAA floated the idea of killing off July? In speaking with more than 10 coaches Wednesday afternoon about what needs to change, none went back to the drama from last fall. Yet that's where the impetus for the morph in recruiting came from. How quickly they forget and how frenzied they are to move forward.
"As a dad, I'd like to see 10, maybe 14 days in July," Mills said. "When you've got guys like Pat Kelsey and Brandon Miller [both assistants who abruptly quit the profession recently] leaving, what does that tell you?"
The tremendous amount of stress involved is accepted as part of the reason why former coaches Skip Prosser (2007) and Neil Dougherty (this month) died -- unfortunate reminders that this grind, ultimately, isn't worth it for most. "I didn't learn to turn my phone off for 17 years," Santa Clara coach Kerry Keating said.
So the more spread out the calendar is, the better. Making recruiting trips require less than a full suitcase can lead to more efficient family life and business execution. It's a school of thought that coaches are trying to get the NCAA to embrace as it makes its slow march toward a re-draft of how teams are built in the offseason.
"You can see so many more kids," Florida assistant and former St. John's head coach Norm Roberts said. "What I think would be the best, is to have April back with two-to-three weekends, and then have a weekend in June and they could cut July back a couple of days. I don't think that's bad. Cut it to 12 days. It gives you a better indicator of where kids are."
Keating is the most radical thinker of them all. He's open to three one-week periods -- 21 days over May, June and July -- but would really like to see about 300 days per year open for recruiting. Leave it in the hands of the school to pick their spots. It's how the playing field would truly be leveled. There wasn't one other coach I spoke to who brought up this idea, but it's certainly not that crazy. A night here, a weekend there. There's myriad chances that present themselves, from high school games to AAU events to NBA camps. "Why can't we go to the NBA camp and evaluate that?" Keating said. "We keep putting gum in the holes in the dam instead of building a new dam ... There's no reason we can't be there other than we can't be there. And that's how we've always done it. This whole month has come down to Peach Jam and Vegas, with the other smaller tournament in between."
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| 'We don't need the whole months -- just a couple of weekends,' Rick Stansbury says. (Getty Images) |
"The two fundamental ideals they give too much credence and value to is, one size fits all -- that's not true — and that they can ever level the playing field," Reveno said. "That can't happen. Right there, it's flawed."
"You have 345 schools and we're never all going to agree on something," Cal coach Mike Montgomery said.
The unrealistic challenge staring the NCAA in the face is straightening out a yarn that can't be unknotted. Recruiting will forever be imperfect. There are scars in the system's body that can't be scraped away.
"Coaches cannot solve this," Reveno said. "It's too big."
AAU coaches have strangleholds on NCAA coaches, who feel obligated not only to attend tournaments in order to babysit verbally committed players, but also show up to program-sponsored events. AAU coaches can and have withheld recruiting information over coaches' heads.
"AAU recruiting services —-- they're the only eyes we have in the spring," Mills said. "Unfortunately, right now, they're critical. People don't like that they have these services, charging coaches a lot of money to pay for information. It's a broken system."
Mills suggested two weekends in April, but stay away from Easter weekend. Go six days -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday -- then 14 in July. That's two seven-day periods. Getting lost in all the scenarios tossed out in this column? Then you get a sense of what college basketball and the NCAA is dealing with. But instead of five or six suggestions, it's dozens. And it's big-conference commissioners lobbying for an infrastructure that will probably be unfair to mid-majors.
The good news: There's another NCAA rule that should dovetail with the overhaul to the recruiting calendar. Next summer, if players enroll in summer classes, they'll be able to work out with coaches so long as they're in school. In fact, there's a common belief that getting to know incoming freshmen in July, working out with them, being with them, is more valuable to coaches than babysitting a verbally committed player for the fourth time in a three-week period.
"It's give and take," Roberts said. "If they're going to give us access to players ... then take days away from recruiting, I can understand that."
Mills waxed somber over the fact incoming Baylor freshmen Deuce Bello and Quincy Miller are at Baylor right now, yet coaches are zipping across the country, unable to get acclimated with their new guys.
"There's nobody there watching them right now," Miller said. "Are there agents around? Nobody's going to be there to [watch] them. They [agents] know when to attack and when they're vulnerable -- they're not coming around during the season. ... I also get worried that I'm out here chasing kids that aren't ours, and we have 13 kids that are ours that we can't see right now."
"They are our kids then, give us time to see them in the summer," Stansbury said. "As it is right now, you can't see them to lift a weight or do anything. It is our job. We are coaches. Give us time in the summertime. Then we don't spend all of our time in July babysitting kids for 10 days. That's all it is. Especially the last 10 days, there's more babysitting going on then."
Others disagreed. Some say they do true evaluating start to finish in July. And amid all this noise, what difference will a new format make, anyway? "One coach said to me this weekend, 'Everyone's going to get pretty much who they're going to get anyway,'" Keating said. "So if that's the case, why don't we be more efficient, smart and economical about it?"
Evaluate in April, babysit in July. That's the grand plan many I talked to banked on. But no matter the decision that's made months from now, it seems as many solutions that are sewn up will cause fabric rips in other places. As long as AAU pumps blood into college basketball, an inconsistency and inherent unfairness will flow right along with it.
