Remember when sports use to be fun?
Well they still are fun; fun to play, fun to watch and fun to fight over amongst your friends. Andwhile many are crazy for their professional sports teams in the NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball, nothing quite brings out the intensity like college athletics. It is about pride, the name on the front of the jersey not the back, and about tradition.
But something has happened n the last 20-25 years that has really taken some of the fun out of sports: Recruiting.
Now don’t get me wrong, recruiting is the life line of college athletics. It is what makes the difference between the good teams and the bad teams; the elite programs and the cellar dwellers. The problem I have with recruiting is the focus put on it by fans and the media as well as the negative impacts it has had on the integrity of colleges, their coaches and the fact it turns kids into these egotistical monsters.
Here, we spend only a moderate amount of time on football and basketball recruiting, but we don’t bend over backwards to make sure every blip on the radar gets an expose or every time a recruit breaks wind we write a story about it. We cover the basics, the whoses, the whens, and some overall reflective pieces on decisions, but we don’t devote a lot of man hours to the ever changing recruiting scene. Its just too hard.
Recruiting to me takes some of the fun out of college sports. There is no mystery anymore and there is no time to enjoy the team you’ve got. Everyone has one eye on the present and one eye on the future. The pressure is immense, for coaches and their perspective targets.
Pressure on Coaches
Ask just about any college coach and they will likely tell you their least favorite part of the job is recruiting. It turns coaches into salesmen and if they don’t deliver they end up feeling like Willy Loman.
The weight of the world falls on the coaches who have to score the next big target, or in the new world order created by John Calipari and Kentucky, targets.
It is a never ending vicious cycle and the constant pressure forces some coaches into nefarious means to land the next great player. The NCAA has failed to keep these coaches under wraps. And it isn’t just the college coaches. It is the parents of players, the AAU coaches, the high school coaches, the entourages of these future stars and the money that could potentially be streaming in.
There are more rules to follow than people to actually uphold the rules. The NCAA is a neutered police force that does little more than throws out the occasional empty threat or harmless penalty. Some coaches and universities continue to operate in a shroud of suspicion with no real threat to their operations.
Coaches are forced to do things that may go against their nature just to keep up, but as so often is the case, those are the ones that get caught.
Schools Making Sacrifices
It isn’t just the coaches but the schools that also sacrifice their own standards for the sake of getting the next great athlete. College used to be about higher learning but when it comes to athletics some schools are turning their heads and lowering their standards to get kids who are only interested in sports and not actual studies into their schools.
Fake degrees are issued to fake students who take fake classes but it doesn’t matter as long as those programs win on the playing field or court.
The University of North Carolina, one of the better public academic institutions in the country, has spent nearly a million dollars attempting to cover up…err… resolve their academic fraud scandal that involved their athletic programs.
Other schools like UConn have actually lost post season eligibility for failure to uphold strong enough academic standards for their teams, but it schools continue to lower the bar they are going to need a backhoe to dig a hole.
Kids turning into Prima Donnas
It is bad enough that coaches and universities have sacrificed themselves for 17 or 18 year old kids but they are turning this kids into egomaniacs.
They don’t have to do too much for some who have been told since they could crawl that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Schools are now recruiting athletes in middle school and in some cases offering them scholarships.
These kids already have an overly inflated sense of self and having a major college offer them scholarships at such a young age is potentially harmful.
Many of these kids are born with a sense of entitlement and they feel like everything should be given to them and when they do get to college, some are not willing to put in the work. This leads to transfers and early defections as they attempt to seek out their greatness. The truth is few will make it and fewer are ready but they have been told how great they are their whole life and most of them rush into unwise decisions.
Recruiting feeds into that. When media cover every thing they do the feel special, who wouldn’t, but again is it too much for an 18 year old? I say yes.
The problem is the demand is there. Fans flock to sites for recruiting info. They want to see who’s next and what the odds of the next big thing coming to their school are.
Fans can’t even begin to enjoy a season before they contemplate lineups and possible lineups for the next season. Such is the nature of sports now. But really that has made it a little less fun.
Adults stress out over decisions of kids and will go to incredibly low lengths to criticize kids when they don’t choose their school. They also potentially bend rules to tray and sway them to come.
Recruiting has become a dirty word in some areas and for good reason. It is a huge part of sports but really it has done nothing but taken some of the fun out of the game.
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