NCAA Recruiting Deregulation: Bob Stoops Talks Controversial Changes
Dec 01, 2012; Fort Worth, TX, USA; Oklahoma Sooners head coach Bob Stoops (left) speaks with TCU Horned Frogs head coach Gary Patterson before the game at Amon G. Carter Stadium. Oklahoma won 24-17. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
It’s been a busy week for Oklahoma Sooners head coach Bob Stoops interview clips. As he has been out on the annual OU caravan tour, people have asked him about everything from the College Football Playoffs to the SEC dominance in college football. This time around, he was also asked about NCAA recruiting deregulation.
This year, the NCAA considered making changes in how coaches could communicate with recruits and that all came down to NCAA recruiting deregulation. Text messaging has been banned in college football since 2007 and the NCAA was considering making changes that allowed unlimited electronic communication – including text messages.
This was supposedly to make the NCAA rule book more enforceable. However, complaints by a number of coaches in high school and college programs caused the NCAA to suspend the talks for now. According to the NCAA, “The Board’s suspension sends the text messaging proposal (except basketball) back to the Rules Working Group so that all recruiting concepts still under review are examined further as a package.”
Bob Stoops agrees with the decision to send NCAA recruiting deregulation back for more discussion.
"“I’m glad they’re looking at it. It needs to be well thought out,” Stoops said. “Seemed like they were just ready to, in other words, let’s take it out of the NCAA and our compliance hands, and let’s have no regulation. Well, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I don’t think it’s been totally broke, so let’s not totally change it.”"
This makes sense because if the NCAA suddenly de-regulated recruiting, it could cause a sandstorm of coaches continuously reaching out to recruits – disrupting the high school students life and high school career. Could you imagine how many phone emails, text messages and calls the number one recruit in the nation would get weekly if there was no regulations? These rules are not just in place to level the playing field for college coaches but for the well-being of the high school student athletes as well.
One of the reasons for NCAA recruiting deregulation is because of the men who cheat the system, which includes former members of the Oklahoma Sooners’ coaching family such as Kelvin Sampson. But, just because some people cheat does not mean that the rules should be abandoned.
Bob Stoops feels that instead of NCAA recruiting deregulation, the NCAA should do a better job of enforcing the rules in place.
"“Too much of the time, we want to put rules in to say, well, since guys are doing it illegally, say calling players when they’re not supposed to call them on a phone that can’t be traced, why then just open it up to everybody?” Stoops said. “I think they need to do a better job of communicating with players. If a player says he talked to so and so at whatever time of year, whether you can trace it or not, however he called him, he called me, I talked to him, well, that’s a violation. Have it severe enough to where they don’t want to do it. I don’t think we do a good enough job of that.”"
Source: Norman Transcript