A Hypothetical Situation

Let's, for the sake of an argument, say that Cam Newton is, after winning the Heisman and national championship of course, found to be ineligible by the NCAA investigation. Auburn is stripped of their awards and told to be more careful in recruiting in the future. So Gene Chizik moves into the offseason, and into the new recruiting season. Let's say he takes on a "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice....well that's strike three" mentality and decides that all communications, phone calls, voice mails, text messages, emails, letters, etc., are going to be recorded and filed away in order to cover their ass in any future investigation.

And because other schools and coaches in the country fear the same thing happening to them, decide to do the same in their recruiting from now on.

Jump to October 2011. Kiehl Frazier (yeah, he spells it like that) is Auburn's starting QB and en route to win the Heisman as a freshman!



Enter Bobby Petrino. Bobby is PISSED. Last year Auburn QB Cam Newton kept an award from going to any other player, like Ryan Mallet for example. Now, Auburn QB Kiehl Frazier is about to do it again. And it just so happens that Bobby Petrino tried to recruit Frazier, and in the conversations that he had with Kiehl and his parent's, he happened to record a juicy little nugget that he had originally dismissed.

As it turns out, during Kiehl's recruitment with Arkansas, Kiehl's parents naively asked, not knowing the NCAA laws regarding the recruitment of their child, "is their anything that you can give us besides a scholarship, like maybe travel expenses to away games, or extra tickets for the family?" Of course Petrino said "no, we can't do that and it's best if we don't talk about it anymore," and ended up losing the recruit to Auburn.

But now, now comes the fun part. Petrino makes a phone call to Joe Schad at ESPN, and turns over the recorded conversation.

I think by now you know where I'm going with this. What is to stop the Camgate situation from happening over and over again? I think it is safe to say that recording all interactions with recruits to cover your ass is something a lot of coaching staffs are going to think about in the next recruiting class. Is solicitation really that bad? Especially when it is not done by the actual recruit? Where do we draw the line? Maybe the Cam situation is drawing that very line now. The bottom line is the NCAA is going to have to make tough a decision, rewrite the by laws, and really take a hard look at what is going on the recruitment of high school players.

I'm not sure how to handle this situation. Maybe we go Dazed and Confused and ask all high school athletes to sign a waver in high school stating they will comply with all NCAA rules when it comes to college recruitments. But what if agents start paying kids in high school? What if agents pay students to walk on, and avoid recruitment all together? It all leads into a very shady forest, and eventually someone will burn that forest to the ground.