New guidelines on college admissions exemptions for athletes

Many athletes are offered admission to colleges and universities without meeting the academic requirements that other, non-athletes have to meet. Some colleges are more lenient that others, and that's a concern among college administrators and athletic department officials who fear that some schools will then have an advantage over others.

Now, an organization called the Association of Chief Admissions Officers at Public Universities has developed a set a guidelines, with a set of  best practices, for managing these types of admissions practices.

“The document ... hits on topics ranging from how to handle inquiries from the athletics department and how to tackle questions about international credentials, recruits’ privacy and documents, transfer students, and mid-year graduation,” according to an October 5 article in Inside Higher Education.

Sounds like great reading for anyone interested in college football recruiting.

A top recruiting consultant on what colleges look for in recruits

When I wrote Beyond Friday Nights: College Football Recruiting for Players and Parents, my book on the college football recruiting process, former college coach Randy Rodgers was one of my excellent sources. These days, Rodgers runs Randy Rodgers Recruiting, a recruiting service for college football programs. In other words, he evaluates high school football players for those programs, providing them with accurate information about prospective recruits. For high school players and parents, he's one of the good guys in college football recruiting, with excellent knowledge about what colleges look for and what they don't look for. And to top that off, he's also a great communicator ... it's very easy to talk to him, without ever getting the feeling that he thinks he knows more than you ... and he's a straight-talker too. And for a high school player and his parents, that sort of rapport is always welcome.

Today, Rodger's advice about offensive linemen and what colleges look for in them is featured in an article by Greg Tepper on Dave Campbell's Texas Football Magazine website. Even if you aren't interested in offensive lineman, the sort of analysis provided here offers some good insights into how colleges go about sizing up potential recruits for a position. Check it out.

Some schools don't like multi-year scholarships ...

There's still not much hard evidence yet about which schools might be offering the new NCAA-approved multi-year scholarships to college football players. But the Austin American-Statesman's Kirk Bohls has a good article today about the entire issue. Bohls notes that some coaches argue that players with multi-year scholarships might become complacent and not work as hard to perform at their best if they know they won't lose those scholarships. With one-year renewable scholarships, they argue, student-athletes have something to work for, and therefore will be more accountable.

Guess that could be an issue for some players, but it's hard for me to believe it would be widespread, certainly not at a level to jeopardize the whole concept. Instead, multi-year scholarships would seem to be one of the few protections players have in world of Division I college football, where coaches have ultimate control over so much of their player's lives, and there is generally little room for players to appeal any coaching decision or behavior. For once, we have an NCAA that is looking out for players' best interest, even if it comes at the expense of the winning-at-any-cost mentality that permeates much of today's big-time college football.

See previous posts in this blog for more background on the multi-year scholarship issue.

North Carolina ... paying the price for NCAA infractions

Taken verbatim from the NCAA, here's some more disheartening news for the college football world, including potential recruits:

"University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is responsible for multiple violations, including academic fraud, impermissible agent benefits, ineligible participation and a failure to monitor its football program, according to the decision announced today by the Division I Committee on Infractions.

"Over the course of three seasons, six football student-athletes competed while ineligible as a result of these violations, and multiple student-athletes received impermissible benefits totaling more than $31,000."

And here's a link to the full story, again from the NCAA itself.

Social media's big effect on the recruiting process ...

Social networking is rapidly changing the recruiting process, whether NCAA regulations keep up or not. Those regulations don't allow college coaches to text potential recruits, but they allow communications through the email function on Facebook. They also allow regular, direct email communications. But throw Twitter and other social networking capabilities and you've got a rapidly increasing number -- and difficult to police -- ways in which college coaches and even fans of college teams can and do communicate with potential recruits. A recent Killeen Daily Herald (Texas) article does a solid job presenting these issues. Check it out ... it's a good, informative read.

Multi-year scholarships ... anyone offering them?

Trying to determine how multi-year athletic scholarships (which can be offered by NCAA Division I colleges and universities now) might change football recruiting, I posed this question to the football recruiting experts at Dave Campell's Texas Football's “Mailbag Madness” column: “Now that Division I multi-year scholarships have withstood a challenge, are any Texas colleges or universities offering them?”

In response, they said they're not aware of any being offered so far, but ... so be sure to take a look at their insightful answer. (At that link, scroll down to the end of the page.)

See my previous post on multi-year scholarships for more background on them. 

Multi-year scholarships survive ... just barely

The votes are in, and multi-year scholarships for Division I schools survive ... but just barely! Opponents of the optional multi-year scholarships, which now can be awarded to student-athletes instead of the previously required one-year renewable scholarships, needed 62.5 percent of the vote to overturn it. They got 62.12 percent, reports the NCAA.

Those percentages are based on similarly close vote counts. Overturning the measure would have required 207 votes -- five-eighths of the total -- from 330 institutions. But opponents only mustered 205 votes, reports Steve Wieberg in USA Today.

The vote was required of the Division I membership after enough schools complained about the multi-year scholarship reform measure, which was adopted late last year by the NCAA Division I Board of Directors.

This extremely close vote indicates, however, that there's not much consensus on this issue among Division I institutions. So what are the implications? Hard to know at this point, because it depends on how many institutions move to multi-year scholarships, and how soon they do that. But it seems clear that it will be a great recruiting tool for the schools that offer them. And it would seem to be a great deal for student-athletes too, guaranteeing them a scholarship for the length of their eligibility, giving them needed security for all of the contributions they make to a school's athletic program and thus the school itself.

But might there be some downsides, too? For example, it would seem that there will be fewer opportunities for walk-on football players to earn a scholarship at a Division I school. That's simply because the guaranteed multi-year scholarships allow schools much less flexibility ... at least as compared to the renewable one-year scholarships ... in making year-to-year scholarship decisions. To be sure, fewer scholarships will now become available, under the 85-scholarship limit in place for Division I institutions, to walk-on players. What do you think?