KinesiologyNerd

June 7th, 2011 at 9:58 AM ^

The big question is how many recruits have iPads? My guess would be very few. Also, the NCAA would sniff it out fast. Like Jim Harbaugh sending cryptic messages to recruits on Twitter, this would be discovered.

readyourguard

June 7th, 2011 at 9:59 AM ^

If there's a loophole, the SEC will find it.

That said, there is no greater recruiting advantage than winning.  To borrow a phrase from the emaciated corpse of Al Davs, "Just win, baby."

King Douche Ornery

June 7th, 2011 at 10:05 AM ^

Just go ahead and pay the players a little bit of extra money. The cheaters will still cheat, but at least everyone can offer something.

Next, don't worry about iPhones/iPads--the students WILL get them. They can get $100 tennis shoes, and all the gadgets, just don't ask them to do homework or come to school with a pencil or pen.

Next: Concede the National Championship to the SEC, let them play each other and ONLY each other, let them form their own league or association with Texas and Oklahoma, and then have the REST of the NCAA play the thing that now somewhat resembles "amateur" college sports.

Lastly: follow Lane Kiffin around for a month and just say "Everything he does is illegal." Use that for your new rule book.

CRex

June 7th, 2011 at 10:14 AM ^

The whole secret app think seems to be a little over thought.  A coach could just get a cellphone in his wife's name and use that for illegal contact.  When the NCAA demands phone records, he hands them his phone and goes right on making illegal calls using his "wife's" phone.  The whole app thing means you have staff and programmers in out it, easier for it to leak than just using your wife's Visa to pay for an iPhone.

You know that scene from Transporter when the guy breaks his phone, opens his glove box and there are six more phones in it?  Five seconds after he saw that, I'm sure Nick Saban was screaming at his aides ot get him something like that.  

UM_lawful

June 7th, 2011 at 1:37 PM ^

I am pretty sure this would still be illegal contact.

The article states:

"For those unfamiliar with the term, a push notification in it’s most general term is the sending data from a server to a device (ex: phone or computer). For most it’s very similar to receiving a text message on a phone."

 

That would violate the rules. 

 

Picktown GoBlue

June 7th, 2011 at 7:57 PM ^

but if some SEC coach wants to hire you to do some programming, nice tutorials here and here from the looks of it.  Needless to say, there would be a fair amount of work to be put in to create the app plus the server side on the offending campus that the original article described.  You'll also need to get the App past the Apple approval process.  And, at least for the Apple case, there really isn't much space in the protocol for sending text, although it could match short tweets or SMS's.  Next hurdle is to get all your assistant coaches to support getting recruits to load these apps on their phones and then also updating the main database back on campus to indicate the device that is to receive the the messages.

As noted already in the thread, you'd still be communicating via a type of text-based messaging, so I doubt any rules would need to change...just the tactics for discovering the violations.

Why not send coded messages in an online Scrabble game?  Or just join up on Halo or Call of Duty?  Heck, invite their avatars to your Animal Crossing town...

IllegalShift

June 8th, 2011 at 9:45 AM ^

Schools already have apps like these that exists. Arkansas just released "The Petrino Plan" a few months ago. And the school has said that it was created to be a recruiting tool. Every coach has an ipad that they take with them when they visit a recruit's home and show em the app.

Their app currently doesn't use "push notifications", but they could easily add those in.