OT- UConn's Edsal Talks Recruiting
Edsal Q&A
I was reading through this Q&A with Randy Edsal, UConn's football coach earlier today. After you sift through some of the coachspeak, he talks about recruiting, and has some real interesting things to say.
Edsal thinks that scholarships shouldn't be offered until Sept. 1 of a player's senior year, because of academics and camps, etc.
It's a good read if you have some time.
If offers aren't given until September 1, that doesn't give much time for potential early enrollees to research a school, visit, and make his decision.
I don't know if that's exactly what he intended, but I was just mentioning that as part of the article. Edsal's a well-respected coach so it's interesting to see what he has to say, that's all sir.
His views on secondary violations seem highly unfair to the athletes:
"If the NCAA went and said, if you commit a violation recruiting a kid, then you're not allowed to recruit that kid anymore, that's going to make the number of violations drop."
While he is certainly right that this would drop the number of violations, it also means that a genuinely accidental violation would result in a rather excessive punishment. It seems somewhat unfair that a coach in this situation would lose the ability to recruit a target, but it would also help to clean up the recruiting process. However, it is extremely unfair to the athlete, who loses out on one of his offers solely because of a stupid mistake on the part of a coach.
There is no good solution to the problem of secondary violations. Attempting to institute any meaningful penalties for them would simply lead to schools with high numbers of violations (*cough* Ohio State *cough*) to stop self-reporting all of the secondary violations they commit. The only possible solution I can come up with is for the NCAA to hit all the schools with a large number of violations with some major penalties, and then remake their investigations unit into a more active and powerful organization than it has been in recent years. This would probably scare schools into trying to avoid secondary violations, instead of their current policy of break the rules and then say sorry afterwards. However, as the NCAA has no spine, this won't happen (breathe easy Lane Kiffin, your program is worth enough money that the NCAA will leave you alone).