We Don't Make The Rules

TigerBlog has spent much of his summer being asked the same question: What does a verbal commitment from a high school prospect mean?

And he has spent much of his summer giving the same answer: Nothing, with pieces of everything mixed in.

The trend these days is for younger and younger athletes to commit, verbally, to the college of their choice. In the sport with which TigerBlog is most familiar, a seemingly update of such commitments can be found on Inside Lacrosse's website, even including those from the Class of 2015.

For those who don't do math in the summer, that would mean rising sophomores.

The issue with verbal commitments is that they don't bind the prospect and school in any tangible way. It is not until the prospect signs a national letter of intent that would be penalties for reneging, and a prospect cannot sign a letter of intent until senior year of high school.

For Princeton and the Ivy League, prospects don't commit to the school; they commit to the admissions process. It is not until an official offer of admission is made and then officially accepted that the prospect and school are bound to each other.

So, with those definitions, no, a verbal commitment doesn't mean a thing.

On the other hand, if schools go out and get all these verbal commitments and then change their mind, then no other prospect will ever take their offer of a roster spot seriously.

What's that you ask?

If coaches cannot call prospects prior to July 1 after their junior year of high school or email them until Sept. 1 after their junior year (both dates are slightly earlier in football, basketball and hockey), how can they be making verbal commitments?

Well, it's like this. The coach can't call the player, but the player can call the coach - and talk to him/her as long as he/she would like. And the college coach can initiate contact with the prospect's high school or club coach, suggesting that perhaps that prospect should call the coach.

The coach can't tell the player about how great the program is, but invitations to camps and clinics can be made. Official visits can't be made until senior year, but anyone can make as many unofficial visits as they want.

In other words, the rules are very contradictory.

On the one hand, they seem to suggest that high school athletes shouldn't be able to make official visits, be contacted by college coaches and make commitments until senior year. On the other hand, there are so many ways around those rules that they seem to be antidiluvian.

As an aside, TB had a calculus teacher senior year of high school who loved to use that word, and that last sentence was the culmination of a 30-year quest by TB to use it in something he wrote.

Because of the confusion all of these rules create, the next question TB often gets is this: Why doesn't the NCAA do something about it?

TB chuckles when he hears that, just as he chuckled this morning when he heard the tail end of an interview on the radio with someone whose identity TB never got, a man who was discussing the big-picture ramifications of the Penn State situation on college athletics, not so much from the specifics of the scandal but instead on whether or not college athletics - and specifically big-time coaches like Joe Paterno - have too much influence on their campuses.

It's not an awful conversation to have, and the guest credited big-time college athletics with many positives. He did mention, though, that coaches' salaries are way out of whack with the rest of the institution and that coaches have sources of income beyond salaries - and massive conflicts of interest that go along with them - that universities would never tolerate from professors and others.

He concluded by saying that the universities need to police themselves, before the NCAA does it for them.

Again, TB laughed.

And why? Because the NCAA is the universities.

The NCAA has no power to make rules, only to enforce the rules that are made by the member institutions.

And so when there is to be change, it has to be proposed by a school or league or group of leagues and then voted on and approved by all of the other schools. It's not like the NCAA can sit in its headquarters and say "here is the recruiting calendar" or "coaches cannot do this or that."

The rules changes have to come from the schools, and most of the time, the agenda is being driven by the very coaches whom any want to see policed. So how is real change going to come?

If anything, coaches want to see fewer restrictions on them, rather than making it more difficult.

Again, many of the ills of college athletics that the guest spoke about don't really apply to Princeton or the Ivy League, and for TB, that's always been one of the best parts about being here.

Still, the NCAA rules most definitely affect the Ivy League, and the agenda can be hard to control sometimes.

The rules are coming from within, not from the NCAA governing body itself.

Keep that in mind the next time you criticize the NCAA, or at least criticize the NCAA for the rules themselves.