An NCAA cabinet that oversees recruiting is ready to put an end to the practice of offering scholarships to underage prospects.
A proposed rules change drawn up by the Division I Recruiting and Athletics Personnel Issues Cabinet would prohibit verbal offers before the summer following an athlete's junior year of high school — specifically before July 1. Prospects would have to have a five-semester academic transcript on file at their high schools.
The move addresses a handful of cases in recent years in which coaches have made non-binding offers to junior high-age prospects. Most recently, Southern California football coach Lane Kiffin offered a scholarship in February to a then-13-year-old, seventh-grade quarterback from Delaware. Basketball's Tim Floyd and Billy Gillispie made offers to young prospects while they were at USC and Kentucky, respectively.
Cabinet chair Petrina Long, a senior associate athletics director at UCLA, told The NCAA News that the panel fielded concerns about pressure on coaches, prospects and the prospects' families to make such early decisions. Coaches, she said, felt they needed to "keep up" or lose out on high-potential athletes.
Though the issue has surfaced most prominently in football and men's basketball, the proposed rules change would apply to all sports. It could come to a vote as early as January.
If adopted, Long acknowledged the difficulty of monitoring verbal agreements and allowed that the measure could be difficult to enforce. "People who don't plan to follow the rules don't follow the rules whether we can monitor them or not," she told The NCAA News. "There has to be an agreement among coaches and administrators that the spirit of what we're doing is as important as the rule itself, and the spirit is clearly that we do not want this behavior to go on.
"Can a coach purchase a cellphone, call someone, and throw it away? Yes. Is that the kind of people we really want in this business? No."
possible ncaa rule change on recruiting??
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