Last January, the NCAA Board of Directors announced with much fanfare
the passage of 25 measures designed to streamline its famously oversized rulebook, including a handful created to deregulate recruiting. It marked the culmination of more than a year of work by Mark Emmert's specially appointed Division I Presidential Working Group on Rules. "There was virtually no debate on it," Emmert said of the approval of the measures at the time. "Everyone agreed that those rules need to be changed."
However, within days of the Board enacting the new recruiting proposals, football coaches across the country expressed
near-universal shock and dismay. It was immediately evident that unrestricted phone calls and text messages would wreak havoc on both coaches' free time and prospects' phones. Meanwhile, two other measures -- one allowing any staff member (not just coaches) to contact recruits and another allowing schools to send unlimited printed materials -- were ripe for abuse and could prompt an inevitable arms race among the sport's richest programs.
In early February, Big Ten coaches took the unusual step of
releasing a statement denouncing the changes. In March, the Board took the even rarer step of
preemptively suspending two proposals, while the members cast the 75 override votes necessary to put the unlimited calls/text measure on the shelf.
The proposals will go back before the Board of Directors on Thursday, when it can either reauthorize them or send them back to the drawing board. Given the blowback, it's assumed the Board will do the latter.
Whoever is to blame, there was clearly a colossal breakdown in communication and possibly a misunderstanding from the beginning as to the working group's charge. The fiasco underscores the perhaps misguided notion of lumping football in with all other sports when enacting certain NCAA legislation and a greater resistance to the NCAA's attempt to shift away from legislating a "level playing field."
