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DEL.ICIO.USFootball recruiting a five-star scandal, panel told
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/22/07 5:46 PM
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Washington — College football recruitniks need to get a life.
That warning came from witnesses Monday before the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics who claimed that external pressures are warping the recruiting process, damaging the psyches of 17-year-old high school athletes and corrupting parents and coaches.
Web sites such as Rivals.com and Scout.com have become gospel for millions of fans who follow recruiting nearly as fervently as they follow the actual college football season, witnesses told the commission.
They said this has helped create a generation of players and parents who covet the sites’ five-star and four-star ratings. High school coaches are pressured by parents to turn out these highly ranked players, and college coaches are pressured by boosters to sign them.
“There are parents out there who are pulling guns on coaches,” said Harry Edwards, a sports sociologist, former professor and consultant to the University of Florida football team. In his native Oakland, Calif., he said, “I have seen shootings over a kid getting playing time.”
Often parents drive their sons hundreds of miles to participate in football camps where they are weighed, timed, tested and otherwise evaluated.
“The elite athletic prospect has become completely commoditized,” said Edwards, and in the process the very top recruits have become “hedonistic, materialistic and individualistic.”
Because of their inner-city backgrounds, he said, some of these recruits are also gun-toting gang members. Edwards said it is only a matter of time before one of these spoiled recruits “goes off” in the athletic department because he is not treated the same after joining the team.
There’s no doubt that high school players read the recruiting Web sites religiously, said Andrew Crummey, a junior offensive lineman for the University of Maryland football team.
“People can say some very hurtful things on message boards,” he said. In e-mails from adult fans, “17-year-old kids are getting bashed,” he said. “And players take it to heart.”
Assessing the potential of high school players is “still an inexact science” even for experienced college coaches, said John Bunting, former head coach of the University of North Carolina. But young athletes are being sized up by subscribers who have only viewed an online film clip.
“And on the Internet, anyone can say anything about anybody and not be held accountable,” Bunting said.
But Bobby Burton, chief operating officer of Rivals.com, said that the ratings are a service to subscribers, and noted that newspapers and magazines also publish rankings of top prospects. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Austin American-Statesmen both rank high school football players in their states.
Burton said Rivals.com has 25 employees who evaluate players according to an evaluation process that is explained on the site. They watched videos on 2,500 players to come up with this year’s ratings, he said.
“You’re going to miss on some players and where you rank them. Football is not a science. It’s an art,” Burton said.
Still, he acknowledged that the ratings “are a huge source of contention” and that players and parents contact him often to try to be bumped up a star or two.
There is not much colleges can do about the outside influences such as media, the witnesses said, but some recommended changes in the recruiting process.
“If we treated recruited athletes more like we did regular students in the admission process, we’d be better off,” said J. Douglas Toma, an associate professor at the University of Georgia Institute of Higher Education.
For these incoming football players, he noted, “there is no contact with the regular admissions process until the very end, if at all.”
Rather than “operating in different universes,” he said, the athletic department and academic admissions department should share the responsibility on deciding which athletes get into the school.
Recruiting has strayed far from its supposed mission of helping promising student athletes select a college that will best provide them a higher education, marveled one commissioner.
A whole industry has developed to help athletes market themselves to schools, evaluate prospects for alumni and other fans, and report on which prospects are considering which schools.
National signing day for college football players has become as sensationalized as the National Football League player draft, noted Malcolm Moran, a professor of sports journalism and society at Penn State University.
On national signing day next month, Burton said, Rivals.com expects 75 million visits to its site. On a normal day, he said, Rivals.com gets 12 to 20 million page views.
Bill McGregor, head football coach at DeMatha Catholic High School in Maryland, said he has seen dramatic changes in recruiting and in attitudes during his 25 years on the job.
He once met with college coaches, students and their parents, he said. Now coaches are instant messaging players in their classrooms or at home. While there are limits on phone calls and e-mails to players, there are none on instant messages, he said.
“Parents have changed too,” he said. “It’s ‘what can you do for me now’ (to get their son a football scholarship). Parents have fallen into it hook, line and sinker.”
The Knight Commission was set up in 1989 in response to problems in college athletics and has worked on reforms in a number of areas such as low graduation rates for college athletes, players accepting illicit payments and growing commercialization of college sports.
Their meeting Monday dealt in part with outside influences on recruiting.
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