A Season Inside by John Feinstein Read Free Book Online

his decision and signs early, he may then play his senior season free of recruiting burdens. It cuts down on circus productions like the one that surrounded Ralph Sampson in 1979.
    Sampson was so confused that when he walked to the microphone at a packed press conference in May to announce his decision, he still didn’t know where he was going. He opened his mouth and said, “I have chosen, Ken … Virginia.” The three live TV crews in the room from Kentucky almost had cardiac arrests on the spot. It was that close—and that confused.
    Now, in 1987, Alonzo Mourning, this year’s Ralph Sampson, would make his choice—Georgetown—in November. It was still a circus—with a shoe company representative playing a role—but it was a shorter circus.
    The downside of the rule is that it has pushed recruiting up so that much of it is being done during a player’s junior year and the ensuing summer. The letters and phone calls that followed a player as a senior in the past are now just as intensely there as soon as his junior year begins.
    This is not to imply that the life-and-death pursuit of players or cheating in recruiting is a new thing. It isn’t. Gene Corrigan, who has been athletic director at Virginia and Notre Dame and is now the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, probably explained it best: “Recruiting hasn’t changed very much at all in the last thirty years. It’s just that now everyone notices the cheating. It has always been there.”
    Because everyone notices now and because recruiting became a twelve-month-a-year affair during the 1970s, the NCAA changes the rules more often than Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney change spouses. Once, there were no restrictions on how often you could visit a recruit, on how often you could see him play, on how many visits he could make, on how much time coaches could spend on the road.
    Now, everything is regulated. Each school may pay for a maximum of eighteen official visits for athletes to its campus. Each athlete may officially visit only five schools. There are lengthy “dead” periods when coaches are not allowed off campus to recruit or to see games. And, the period when colleges may officially visit homes has been cut back totwenty-one days. In 1987 that meant home visits began on September 17 and ended on October 7.
    Naturally, coaches hate anything that limits their recruiting time. But the rules make sense. They have brought a tiny semblance of sanity to an insane pursuit.
    Once, when there were no limits on coaches, Dave Pritchett, then an assistant coach at Maryland, rented seven cars in seven cities in two days. Pritchett was so intense about recruiting that when he left town on a recruiting trip he would always park in a tow-away zone. Why? “Because I could never remember where I had parked my car but I always knew where it would be towed to.”
    Makes perfect sense. There is one problem—and it is a very real one—with the limits. They hurt the smaller schools. Now, the player who was willing to visit a small school in the past might pass it up; able to make only five visits, he doesn’t want to “waste” one. With the shorter visitation period, a player may limit the list of schools invited into his home and lop off the smaller school that just wants a chance to make a pitch.
    “The rich get richer is what it is,” said Rick Barnes, who saw the rules work in his favor while at Alabama and Ohio State but was now being hurt by them at George Mason. “If a kid has only five visits and he has a chance to go to a school and see a football game on that last visit, what’s he going to do? It’s frustrating.”
    But that is the nature of recruiting. It is always going to be frustrating and agonizing, no matter what the rules. When coaches leave the profession, they all say, to a man, that their greatest relief is not having to recruit anymore.
    “It is demeaning,” Valvano said. “I have to go in and sell myself and my university.