The news spread across college football quickly on Wednesday afternoon, eliciting reactions of joy and relief: The NCAA is moving toward banning recruiting photo shoots during unofficial visits.
According to a document distributed by the Division I Council and obtained by The Athletic, the Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee this week introduced legislation “to prohibit, during a football prospective student-athlete’s unofficial visits, institutional involvement in arranging photographs or photographing the prospective student-athlete and those accompanying the prospective student-athlete.”
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This proposal is going through a new, expedited legislative system, and now that it has been introduced, NCAA members have 45 days to comment and provide feedback. The oversight committee is scheduled to meet at the end of November to finalize its recommendation on the topic. That will then be presented to the D-I Council on Jan. 10. If the proposal is adopted then, it would take effect on March 1, 2024.
In short, it’s probably safe to get the confetti ready. Strong reactions and celebratory GIFs poured in from recruiting staffers when this proposed rule change went public. One longtime director of football creative asked when the vote would take place, joking that creatives everywhere will be awaiting that news “like an election result.”
“In a world of worrying about everything, it’s one less thing to worry about,” one Big 12 director of player personnel said. “I think that’s a big win.”
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The recruiting photo shoot has escalated to a point that staffers say they never wanted, becoming a huge burden for recruiting and creative teams. Two associate athletic directors said it’s such a pressing issue in football because of the high volume of unofficial visits — there are more than 200 days in the 2022-23 FBS recruiting calendar on which programs can host unofficial visits — but that it’s also something recruits in all sports now expect. It’s a drain across the athletic department.
In the last two years at the annual Personnel and Recruiting Symposium in Nashville, football recruiting staffers from across the country have been voicing their opinion on this topic. A survey of more than 100 staffers conducted at last year’s event found that 78 percent were in favor of only allowing photo shoots on official visits. The other 20 percent believed the rule should not change, and 2 percent voted to completely eliminate photo shoots as part of the recruiting process.
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“I just think the time and energy we’re asking of our equipment staff and our creative teams is astronomical and almost insanity,” Ohio State associate AD for player personnel and GM Mark Pantoni said last summer. “I think a lot of us deal with, really, the only thing these kids care about when they visit campus now is the photo shoot. It has taken away, really, the meaning of visiting campus.”
The topic evokes passionate reactions in the recruiting community. In a 2021 anonymous recruiting survey of assistant coaches, one AAC assistant told The Athletic, “You know how in ‘The Terminator’ it’s about going back to stop something really bad from getting going? Whoever came up with this, I think a lot of coaches would like to see that guy get offed.”
It’s not only a quality problem, though that’s gotten more extreme than ever as the use of luxury cars and even live animals has become normalized. Recruiting staffers, who requested anonymity to avoid being put at a recruiting disadvantage for discussing an aspect of the job they dislike, say it’s the quantity that is wearing them out. Photo shoots for 7-on-7 teams whose prospects aren’t being seriously recruited. Photo shoots with targets who want to try on every uniform combination. Photo shoots for seventh- and eighth-graders. Where do they draw the line?
“It’s also a strain on resources and people,” one GM at a Group of 5 school said. “There’s a trickle-down from recruiting staffs to creative staffs to equipment staffs. It’s time-consuming.”
If you ask people in the recruiting industry, the waste of time and resources becomes more frustrating every year. The time was right to try to address this, too, because the D-I Council recently passed another reform permitting prospects to take an unlimited number of official visits. Pantoni has been pushing the oversight committee to consider this proposal and also took it to a recruiting subcommittee and the Big Ten in the hopes that if his conference led the way, the rest would follow.
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Not every program would be happy with the elimination of the photo shoot. For schools like Oregon that have the most beloved uniforms in the sport, the photo shoot is one of the most anticipated moments of the visit for prospects. One Power 5 GM said he’s not a fan of the proposed change because it’s taking away that opportunity from walk-ons who don’t take official visits. A Pac-12 recruiting director raised another concern that might go down as an unintended consequence of this reform: Might this in some ways devalue the roles of some recruiting and creative staffers who were tasked with photo shoot duty? It’s a fair question. And one Power 5 head coach simply said he believed the rule change would reward staffs he viewed as “lazy.”
The majority of coaches and staffers, though, greeted Wednesday’s news with a sense of relief — and started the official countdown to Jan. 10.
(Photo courtesy of Walker White)