A Discouraged Recruiting Practice That Could One Day Soon Land on the President or Chancellor's Desk
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The Art of Tampering - A Discouraged Recruiting Practice That Could One Day Soon Land on a President or Chancellor's Desk
Executive Summary
With Division I student-athletes in the highest profile sports now able to transfer and compete right away based on Division I Council’s recent action, recruiting tampering is top of mind.
Poaching and “backdoor” recruiting of student-athletes from other colleges is not a new phenomenon.
Student-athletes may become modern day Trojan Horses trying to entice their peer competitors from other NCAA member schools to transfer.
NCAA enforcement vice president has asserted that tampering violation cases are treated very seriously and referenced recent major infractions cases that involved tampering.
The receipt of actionable information regarding recruiting tampering can be difficult for NCAA Enforcement to verifiably pinpoint, investigate and take action.
Several Division I conferences are beginning to eliminate their intra-conference transfer policies.
Division I presidents and chancellors should be mindful they may be called on to “keep the peace” between their institutions, especially those residing in the the same conference, if an allegation of recruiting tampering involving a high-profile student-athlete is credible.
When viewing the end of a college basketball or football game in the future, college athletics stakeholders and sports fans alike with healthy suspicions might view end-of-game handshake lines with a raised eyebrow.
Last week, the NCAA Division I Council adopted Proposal 2020-11 to revise the one-time transfer exception and make it applicable to all sports. This new policy is effective immediately for student-athletes seeking eligibility for the 2021-22 academic year. The new policy also incorporates a transfer notification deadline date of July 1 for the coming year. After this summer, the deadline will be May 1 for fall and winter sports and July 1 for spring sports, and applicable to student-athletes who transfer from a four-year institution to another four-year institution for the first time.
With this deregulated approach to transferring now in place, student-athletes in the highest profile Division I sports may move from School A to School B without encumbrances, making the prospect of “poaching” even more enticing for college coaches. A lot can be said from a coach to a student-athlete in the 5-second window of a postgame handshake about his or her interest in the student-athlete. For example, a seemingly innocuous compliment such as “Great game tonight, you could play for me any day” could now be construed as an earnest overture.
The reality is, even without a visible postgame conversation, “backdoor recruiting,” whereby a coach of one program uses backchannels, such as a family member, friend, club or high school coach affiliated with a student-athlete at another NCAA institution, to convey their interest without being direct in expressing interest -- could increase in volume more than ever before.
There are valid reasons to conclude that tampering has been going on for decades. Relationships exist, albeit often limited ones, between student-athletes at one school with coaches from another.
Division I student-athletes often get to know college coaches from multiple Division I schools through the athlete’s recruiting process during high school (e.g., taking multiple official visits to different schools or talking and texting on the phone with multiple coaches from different programs) as well as through attendance at various college coaches’ summer camps.
Student-athletes, depending on the sport, could even play for different college coaches through club and other non-scholastic team competitions while in high school. Further, depending on the sport, elite-level competition opportunities, such as playing for a U-17 national team or similar elite competition, often involve college coaches coaching these elite teams filled with five-star high school prospects.
Student-athletes could become Trojan Horses
Beyond coaches getting involved in actions that might be considered tampering, there is concern that current student-athletes could be the most prominent poachers. Many student-athletes competing against each other at the Division I level may have played together on club teams, attended high school together, or participated in the same summer camps, tournaments, or other events that created a bond and friendship that continues through college.
From a recruiting standpoint, NCAA rules only go so far to regulate how student-athletes from one school might communicate with student-athletes from another. Student-athletes can communicate and have contact with student-athletes from other schools provided it’s not done at the direction of a coach or staff member. But when those communications start gravitating toward “Come join our team,” whether after a game or via group-text off-line, the landscape becomes complicated and challenging to monitor.
There is concern among the mid-major programs in high-profile sports that they will become farm teams for their counterparts in the Power Five. Mid-major coaches worry about their rising star freshmen or sophomores becoming easier targets for higher echelon programs through the combination of self-administered entry into the NCAA transfer portal and this new transfer exception.
Contextually speaking, stakeholders from the high-profile sports were conditionally supportive of the new transfer exception being adopted, but all had recruiting tampering on their minds. The Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee supported the proposal contingent on it including a transfer notification date of May 1. This notification deadline is important to the sport in order to provide certainty to team rosters and to limit tampering of current student-athletes. The deadline intends to foster timelier decisions by student-athletes pondering a transfer further in advance of the next academic year and playing season.
The Football Oversight Committee also supported the transfer exception proposal but noted its strong concerns about the potential impact on a school's NCAA Division I Academic Performance Rate (APR), as well as the tampering the proposal may encourage. The Football Oversight Committee also recommended that any tampering violation be considered a Level I violation and that the Committee on Academics continue to evaluate likelihood and significance of any unintended APR impact.
Attestations by Involved Coaches and Student-Athletes Affirming No Tampering Occurred
To help curb tampering and amplify accountability for tampering that is discovered subsequent to the transfer, the newly adopted transfer exception requires the head coach of the certifying institution and the student-athlete to certify that no athletics staff member or other representative of the institution’s athletics interest (aka booster) communicated or made contact with the student-athlete, or any individual associated with the student (e.g., family member, scholastic or non-scholastic coach, advisor), directly or indirectly, without first obtaining authorization through the notification of transfer portal process.
The reality is recruiting tampering is an art form that comes in many subtle pastels that, to some, might not (or should not) be construed as tampering. With the emergence of social media and technology at our fingertips, accessibility is no longer a barrier to those who would tamper. Whether initiated by coaches, non-coaching staff, student-athletes, boosters, parents of student-athletes, former high school or club coaches, or other interested parties, the myriad of ways by which a Division I student-athlete at School A learns of interest from School B is plentiful.
When the transfer portal was implemented back in 2018, the Division I Council specified it would add tampering with a current student-athlete at another school to the list of potential Level 2 major violations and considered such an action a significant breach of conduct. As official NCAA transfer portal guidance to student-athletes articulates, the advent of the transfer portal process was accompanied with stiffer penalties intended to strengthen “ethical recruiting with guardrails around tampering (now a Level 2 violation), by helping coaches and student-athletes manage instances when they are contacted about potential transfer.”
The trend lines indicate the long-standing NCAA bylaws that controlled and restricted Division I student-athletes’ ability to permissibly communicate about transferring with coaches from other schools as well as restricted high profile sports’ student-athletes ability to compete right away upon transfer have withered away in favor of student-athletes’ mobility and autonomy over their enrollment and competitive aspirations.
Nicholas Clark, a graduate of and former football player at Coastal Carolina who represented the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee on the Council, said the transfer portal rule change in 2018 promoted fairness and the well-being of college athletes. “This creates a safe place for student-athletes to have a conversation with their coaches and makes the whole process more transparent. This will clean the process up and give more influence and flexibility to the student-athlete.”
High-profile football and basketball coaches, though, have expressed concern about how deregulated the transfer landscape has become and lamented the tampering element. As Gonzaga Men’s Basketball Coach Mark Few stated on an ESPNU Radio interview on Sirius XM back in February, “This idea that we’re worried about what tennis is doing and wrestling, and stuff like that, I think we got to just start adapting to the times better and everybody just admits that basketball and football are a little different. For just having fair leagues and things like this, I wish we'd have all transfers sit out for a year but it sounds like the ship has sailed and so we all just need to adjust and hopefully there won't be any tampering going on and we’ll have to see how it goes.”
In 2018, then-University of Hawaii Football Coach Nick Rolovich tweeted at Oregon State University’s football program for apparently inviting some of his current players to Oregon State’s spring football game.
NCAA Enforcement VP’s Assessment of Tampering Landscape
When the Division I Council’s Transfer Working Group was vetting different concepts that led to the recently adopted one-time transfer exception, Jonathan Duncan, the NCAA’s Vice President for Enforcement, shared his views on tampering with the Working Group. Duncan highlighted the potential pitfalls of tampering that come along with transfer deregulation and, moreover, the challenges of deciphering and detecting whether tampering has actually occurred.
In his August 14, 2017, letter to the Working Group, Mr. Duncan noted that “the enforcement staff receives and processes numerous impermissible contact violations each year, including instances of contact with enrolled student-athletes who ultimately transfer. However, not every impermissible contact involving a transfer student-athlete is considered ‘tampering,’ which makes predetermining violation levels or penalties very difficult. As in other contexts, the enforcement staff looks at the specific facts of each case when making decisions about violation levels and potential penalties.”
Duncan went on to acknowledge that while tampering may occur with increasing frequency, the enforcement staff does not receive information of this nature regularly. When it does, Duncan asserts the staff treats these situations very seriously. In fact, most are investigated and processed as Level II major violations.
It was noted by Duncan that in recent major infractions such as the University of Mississippi’s (October 7, 2016) and Sam Houston State’s (June 20, 2017) public infractions reports, the institutions' coaches actively recruited student-athletes from other four-year institutions without permission in an effort to secure their transfers. The enforcement staff viewed those actions as significant violations and alleged them as Level II violations. The NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions agreed and prescribed appropriate and significant penalties.
Even if a tampering violation were to be processed as Level III, Duncan noted, significant penalties would be appropriate, including recruiting restrictions and possible suspension of the involved coaches, among other punitive measures. Moving forward, the enforcement staff will continue to treat tampering scenarios as serious violations. For example, if the NCAA receives information that an institution maintains a "whiteboard" (traditional or virtual) of potential graduate or undergraduate transfers, and reaches out to those individuals (without them being the NCAA transfer portal), NCAA Enforcement will investigate aggressively.
Similarly, Duncan explained NCAA Enforcement will be very interested in facts suggesting that a program is impermissibly engaging with a third party to discuss the possible transfer of a student-athlete. “If our staff is able to substantiate these or similar occurrences, we will present them to the appropriate Committee on Infractions as Level I, II or major allegations,” Duncan said.
Duncan noted the vast majority of impermissible contact violations enforcement staff processed are isolated and limited contacts initiated by a four-year college prospective student-athlete prior to entering the transfer portal. In most cases, the student-athlete had a pre-existing relationship with the coach and reached out unprompted. Incidentally, this can create an awkward situation for a coach who is mindful of NCAA rules and who makes a good-faith effort to terminate the conversation. While less serious than aggressive tampering or poaching, these contacts are violations, and the enforcement staff normally processes them as Level III. In addition, penalties typically are prescribed for the institution and coaching staff for these violations, depending on who initiated the contact, the number of contacts, etc.
There is understanding that the student-athletes looking to transfer might often be the party that initiates communication with coaches from another school. Recognizing that reality, Duncan remarked that to minimize the risk and impact of these violations, NCAA Enforcement would advise a coach to discourage such contacts (if the student-athlete is not in the NCAA portal) and, if contact nevertheless occurs, to disengage as quickly as possible and report the encounter to the athletics compliance office. Duncan concluded his letter confirming that NCAA Enforcement shares the membership's concerns about tampering with enrolled student-athletes and to continue treating tampering as a serious violation.
In recent months, more Division I conferences have eliminated their intra-conference transfer restrictions in anticipation of this Division I-wide transfer deregulation. For presidents and chancellors across Division I, keeping “collegial” relations with their peer executives may be tested in the future if tampering is alleged by another institution, especially if that institution is a fellow conference member and involves a high-profile sport student-athlete. Should these situations arise and become inflamed when played out in the media, the matter might not stop at the Athletic Director’s desk, it may need intervention from the president's or chancellor’s office, too.
Athletics Veritas is presented for information purposes only and should not be considered advice or counsel on NCAA compliance matters. For guidance on NCAA rules and processes, always consult your university’s athletics compliance office, conference office, and/or the NCAA.
