MICHAEL ADAM RAY

(written for The Daily O’Collegian in April 2013)

In January, former Oklahoma State All-American Thurman Thomas used Twitter to reach out to prep phenom Laquon Treadwell encouraging the nation’s consensus top high school wide receiver to attend OSU. The NFL Hall of Fame running back thought his actions were harmless. They were not.

Thomas had committed a recruiting violation without even knowing it. Albeit a minor infraction, the OSU compliance department had to self-report the improper contact to the National Collegiate Athletics Association, because Thomas didn’t know that his status prohibited him from contacting prospective athletic prospects urging them to consider Oklahoma State.

But is that really his fault?

The current version of the NCAA manual is nearly 450 pages long and 66 of them deal solely with recruiting rules and regulations. Its bylaws cover everything from permissible expenses on recruiting visits to the exact dates during which coaches can contact prospective student athletes. Somewhere in the middle are the rules governing contact with recruits, including via social media.

According to NCAA bylaws, the only representatives of a university allowed to directly contact potential recruits are members of that sport’s coaching staff, but founder of Fieldhouse Media, Kevin DeShazo, wonders why the NCAA doesn’t allow former players such as Thomas to aid their alma maters in recruiting.

“Why is that a violation?” he asked. “In reality, it should be allowable for OSU to have Thurman Thomas recruit for them. It’s a great recruiting tool…All it does is just create more paperwork, more issues for the university.”

University compliance departments have the responsibility of monitoring those issues, and as social media has evolved over the last decade, so have the jobs of compliance directors nationwide. OSU assistant athletic director for compliance, Ben Dyson, says the things have changed greatly since he entered the field 11 years ago.

“Compliance staffs in 2002 were one or two man shops,” he said. “Now we’ve got a staff of seven and we’re probably average for the conference. Some of the conference schools have as many as 10 to 12 when you include interns.”

Jason Leonard, OU’s executive director for athletic compliance told The Oklahoman that staffs could increase tenfold and still struggle to monitor every violation.

“We’re working with a system that you can’t do 100 percent,” Leonard said. “There is no, ‘Do X, Y and Z.’ I wish there was. It’d be awesome. It’d make my job a lot easier. There are still things that occur here, that – even if we had 100 people on the compliance staff – we still can’t catch it all.”

The current NCAA rules governing contact with recruits are complex. According to NCAA bylaws, the only allowable unregulated correspondence between coaches and recruits are emails, letters and facsimiles. Not long ago, texting was also allowed, but after recruits and their families complained of the intrusion—and at times the cost—of the messages, the NCAA decided to ban texts in 2008.

At that time, Division I vice president David Berst said this legislation was also enacted to close a loophole that coaches were using to gain extra phone calls. Because coaches are allowed to receive calls from recruits, they were often sending texts asking players to call them to get around limits on their allowable number of outgoing calls. Before the ban, then Florida coach Urban Meyer admitted to sending out more than 100 text messages per day to recruits.

As more coaches started to embrace the trend and use social media platforms to contact recruits, the NCAA again had to tweak its rulebook. The only problem was deciding how to classify the new technology. In 2009, the organization decided to view direct messages via Twitter or Facebook the same as it does emails, which are virtually unregulated, but it decided that any public communication via wall posts and @replies would be considered violations of public recruiting bylaws.

It also decided that a coach must cease contacting a player via social media if he finds out that the player receives the messages on their phone as the NCAA considers such messages equivalent to texts. If one thing is for sure, though, it’s that coaches and recruits will always find new loopholes, and social media gave them an opportune means to exploit NCAA rules.

When Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean was recruiting standout point guard Kyrie Irving in 2009, he immediately followed Irving on Twitter, but NCAA regulations prevented Crean from directly mentioning Irving on the social networking site.  However, as coaches often do, Crean found a way to work around the system. Irving tweeted after a workout that he was “hungry and humble for more.” Later that day, Crean tweeted that he needed “HUNGRY and HUMBLE WARRIORS” on his team. Despite Crean’s best efforts, Irving committed to Duke, where he stayed one season before becoming the first overall selection in the 2011 National Basketball Association draft.

While some coaches use loopholes to skirt around the rules, others simply don’t know all of them in the first place. While the coach at Tennessee, Lane Kiffin tweeted that he was excited about a new verbal commitment, but because he referred to the player by name before he officially signed a letter of intent, Kiffin committed a public recruiting violation. It was a minor violation only amounted to self-reporting and filing paperwork, but it shows how hard it can be for coaches to keep track of every rule.

As coaches and players have found great uses for social media, fans have also come to use it to cheer on their favorite teams and talk trash to fans of rival teams. With the public nature of most content on social media sites, it was only a matter of time before they started to try to influence recruits, giving the NCAA and compliance offices more potential violations to monitor.

While the current rules might seem unreasonable to an outsider, Dyson says they are in place for a good reason and are a “necessary evil” at the moment.

“You don’t want thousands of people creating these Facebook pages and inundating these kids with requests and pestering them to death,” he said. “They just need to go through the recruiting process with just the coaches and the recruits and their parents. If you get outside influences, that’s when it starts getting ugly.”

While DeShazo understands that fan interaction with recruits can be somewhat intrusive, he doesn’t believe it is important enough to be regulated by the NCAA.

“The reality is, no kid is going to go to some school because some adult got on twitter and said, ‘Hey. I don’t know you, but come play for this school because I’m a fan of their team,’” he said. “They enjoy it. You’ll see big-time recruits saying it’s great having all of the fans tweeting them, but that doesn’t sway their decision.”

Whether it sways their decision, some recruits have shown they love the attention. Cornerback prospect Adrian Baker tweeted, “#BoomerSooner or #TigerNation?” during his recruitment and received hundreds of replies from Oklahoma and Clemson fans before ultimately signing with the Tigers. Every one of those replies was a violation of NCAA rules.

For every Adrian Baker, however, there is a Jordan Watkins. The 2012 defensive line prospect from College Park, Ga. told ESPN.com that the constant contact from people around the country can sometimes be too much. He said he doesn’t mind when coaches contact him for recruiting purposes; everyone else is the problem.

“With so many recruiting Web sites, there’s so many different reporters out there, every single second you get on Facebook there’s somebody trying to get a story from you,” Watkins said. “There was a point I would just stay offline and not even appear online to avoid all that. Now that recruiting is started settling down, I’ve come back online.”

As seen in the Thurman Thomas incident, unintentional illegal contact via social media is so wide spread that even members of the NFL Hall of Fame have been involved. Thomas’ message to Treadwell was simple: “@SuccessfulQuon OSU OSU OSU #OklahomaState.”

The message was short, using only 42 of the allotted 140 characters, but it was enough to force the OSU compliance staff to self-report another violation and file more paperwork.

NCAA spokeswoman Kayci Woodley told The Oklahoman that self-reporting is just to “show the school is doing their due diligence to abide by the NCAA rules.”

DeShazo doesn’t see the point.

“They’re not going to be penalized for it,” he said. “All they have to do is self-report all these violations that end up with no real consequences.”

DeShazo isn’t the only one that feels that way. In his article “Policing the Digital West: NCAA Recruiting Regulations in the Age of Facebook and Twitter,” Victor Broccoli notes that the new rules and regulations have “placed both the NCAA and university athletic compliance offices in the unenviable role of attempting to regulate the entirety of content on Facebook and Twitter, two of the largest Web sites in the world in terms of traffic and data.”

These difficulties are among the many reasons that DeShazo believes the NCAA should stop trying to police social media altogether.

“There are going to be so many networks,” DeShazo said. “If you try to police Facebook, they’re going to Twitter. If you try to police Twitter, they’re going on down the line. Teens and college students are the ones driving social media, so they’re always going to find a way around it. So for the NCAA it’s tough. They can’t enforce this stuff.”

DeShazo and Broccoli aren’t the only ones who think the rules don’t make sense in their current form. In an article in the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law written last summer, Vicki Blohm argues that the rules are no longer serving their purpose.  She states while the rules were designed to reduce the intrusiveness of the recruiting process on high school athletes, they currently “cause more stress than they alleviate.”

Blohm also said the NCAA needs to change its policies regarding electronic communication because high school kids “no longer view phone calls, fax, or even e-mail to be their primary forms of communication.”

She believes “trying to differentiate between different forms of text communication is no longer possible” and feels that coaches should be able to use whatever method of communication is most convenient for the player they’re recruiting.

“These are the tools prospects want coaches to use to get in touch with them,” Blohm said.

Tyus Jones, a 2014 point guard recruit from Apple Valley High School in Apple Valley, Minn., agrees with Blohm.

“I think a text message is probably easier just because kids, we’re always on our phones and always texting,” Jones told ESPN.com in August 2012. “If they just text us real quick, it takes two seconds to text back. I know me personally, if you send out a lot of letters, it takes some time to open all those up. Sometimes talking on the phone takes a long time.”

Broccoli, Blohm and DeShazo are among many calling for drastic simplification of the NCAA manual and they might get their wish in the near future.

On January 19, the Division I Board of Directors adopted 25 proposals that would institute many sweeping changes if put into practice, including a proposal to deregulate all methods and numerical limitations of recruiting contacts.

In a release, the NCAA said that Division I was taking its “first steps toward a rulebook that is more meaningful, enforceable and supportive of student-athlete success” by making a manual that is “flexible” and based on “common sense.”

Gone would be call limits, dead periods and texting bans.

Gone, too, would be about 25 pages of the heavy NCAA manual.

NCAA president Mark Emert said the changes were about more than just thinning out the organizations rulebook.

“Putting it in page numbers isn’t as important as the fact that it’s a complete reset on what the rules are about,” he said. He added that the changes were meant to “focus the rules on those things that are real threats to integrity of sport rather than things that are mostly annoying.”

While the NCAA Division I Board of Directors was excited about the announcement, many of its 340 member institutions were not. The NCAA argued the proposal wouldn’t change much since coaches are already allowed unlimited contact via email, but many people remained skeptical.

“It’s insane,” a football recruiting coordinator at a major-conference school told SI.com. “It’s bad on both ends. If it’s not regulated where coaches have periods here and there that are designated as breaks, you don’t get any time for your family.”

Rivals.com national recruiting analyst Mike Farrell said, “I think it’s horrible.” He added that the toll the new rules would take on coaches, recruits and their families would be “tremendous.”

Coaches at the high school level did not welcome the change either. Cedar Hill High coach Joey McGuire told The Dallas Morning News, “I think the thing about texts is terrible. I think the NCAA has got to be going crazy. … They can’t enforce their rules. So instead of trying to enforce them, or change them in some way, they’re just getting rid of them.”

Even some conferences voiced their apprehension regarding the proposals. The Big Ten released a statement on February 11 wondering whether the “proposals, as currently written, are in the best interest of high school student-athletes, their families and their coaches.”

The conference also said its members were worried about the “adverse effect they would have on college coaches, administrators and university resources.” The conference stated that despite their apprehension, they “look forward to working with the NCAA toward improving the game, the recruiting process and the overall college football experience for all student-athletes.”

On March 18, the Division I Board of Directors suspended proposals regarding who can perform recruiting tasks, the number of recruiters allowed on the road and what can be mailed to recruits, but left the proposal on communication up to the member institutions.

Two days later, however, the required minimum of 75 schools requested an override of the communication deregulation proposal, which will now be reviewed by the board on May 2 along with the other suspended proposals.

For the time being, the NCAA manual is going to remain a little thicker.