Every year coaches make countless numbers of road trips to cities across the nation just for a chance to look at top high school talent. The coaches make friends with these kids and their families. Yet the line between being a good college recruiter and being a cheater is very blurry. It’s almost guaranteed every year there will be major recruiting violations reported from a fairly prestigious school.
I’ve come to a conclusion, and it’s a tad disheartening.
There are two types of coaches, ones who bend and break the rules while still trying to maintain some kind of integrity, and those who blatantly break the rules while essentially having no regard for the consequences. That might be a pessimistic way to look at recruiting, but after years of witnessing scandal after scandal I feel like I have to think this way.
These recruiting violation cases have been around since the rules were pretty much put in place. In my mind, the biggest example would be Southern Methodist University’s “death penalty” in 1987. This boiled down to college players pretty much signing a contract with Texas’ SMU straight out of high school.
The system worked for a little bit while the kids were happy and SMU was winning. But it only takes one unhappy college kid to have the whole thing come crashing down. That’s exactly what happened and SMU was forced to lose its football program for two years.
Miami could soon face the same punishment as well. But college coaches giving players money to come to their school isn’t the only violation coaches try to get away with.
Former Colorado football coach Gary Barnett decided to take a different path and make sure the visiting recruits had a “good time.” This visit would consist of current players getting strippers and enormous amounts of alcohol for the potential teammates. Although Barnett didn’t exactly hire the strippers and buy the booze himself, as coach he had to have known what was going on and he could’ve put a stop to it. Ultimately his terrible record caught up with him and he was fired a year later.
But this last example proves that more often coaches are fired more for their performance on the court than their scandals off it. If you can win, then you have a job. A great current example of this is Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari. Calipari has been to three final fours in his tenures at Massachusetts, Memphis and Kentucky. But only one is officially recognized. He’s faced allegations of paying recruits, players cheating on SATs and free travel for family of team members. But through all the controversy the guy has won games consistently, so he will always be mentioned with the coaching elite.
Unfortunately, I think we are in a system where winning takes precedence over running an honest program. I can’t say there are any exceptions, because there is honestly no way to tell. But I am confident in saying the coach who wins more will ultimately get a better job than the one who runs the honest program. It’d be nice to say that fans care about having an honest program over winning. But do we?