Oklahoma Football: Were Satellite Camps Ever Really Gone?

Earlier this week I wrote that Oklahoma football would not be affected as much as some college program by the NCAA stoppage on satellite camps.

On Thursday, the NCAA made sure that no one will end up being affected by doing what many anticipated when the satellite camp ban was first imposed earlier this month. The NCAA Board of Governors reversed the earlier decision to ban the use of satellite camps as a popular recruiting tool, and that no doubt pleases many more college coaches than first realized, including Big 12 coaches like OU’s Bob Stoops.

How does that time-worn expression go? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Use of satellite camps may be back on the menu, but what the earlier NCAA action signals is a general concern with the entire college football recruiting environment.

In reinstating satellite camps as part of the mix, the NCAA suits made it patently clear that it has concerns about the overall recruiting model and has directed the NCAA Division I Council to conduct a broad assessment of the full process.

Satellite camps are nothing new to the Sooners, who, according to an article this week by Jason Kersey in the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, have been partnering with, of all folks, Oklahoma State in hosting satellite camps in the Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston areas.

Other major conferences, like the SEC and the ACC, had prohibited their coaches from conducting satellite camps even before the ban was imposed across college football by the NCAA earlier this month. The Big 12 appeared to be supportive of the ban at the time it was decreed, but it was not unanimous by any means.

Stoops has been an advocate of the satellite camp concept and the Oklahoman’s Kersey pointed out in his article that the OU head coach had cited junior center Jonathan Alvarez as a case example of how the use of satellite camps can benefit prospects who might fly a little bit under the radar, as well as the schools who recruit them via that process.

“There’s a lot of kid of kids like me, coming out of the DFW area and out of Texas – a highly recruited area – and we get overlooked a lot,” Alvarez told Kersey in an interview this week.  “Those little camps really help a lot to show that we are good and we have skills.”

So satellite camps are back, after a very brief absence, and we are back to square one, which is probably where this rather benign issue should have stayed all along.