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July may be tiresome, but there’s little the NCAA can do to fix that

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Yesterday, I wrote about the current July evaluation period structure -- three five-day recruiting periods in a 19 day span, broken up by a pair of Mondays and Tuesdays -- and the fact that a number of coaches and people involved with high-level recruits believed that it wasn’t the best option.

I ended on this note: “the one thing that most people seem to agree upon is that this is not the best possible model.”

That may be true, but the question that should be asked is whether or not there is a better option than this. As John Infante of the Bylaw Blog notes, there really isn’t an answer that makes July any less strenuous on the kids, and it’s the kids that matter here, not the coaches.

Think about it. We changed from the two 10-day recruiting periods because the prospects were toast by the end a week-and-a-half stretch of playing two and three games a day while shlepping across the country. Sean Miller, Arizona’s head coach, proposed a single 12-to-15 day evaluation period, but that would only exacerbate all of the problems involved in both schedule structures. Portland head coach Eric Reveno tossed out the idea of having a set number of recruiting days for the coaches, but that would mean that the players have to be on the road constantly, as the players looking to earn a scholarship will want to play in front of coaches as often as possible.

The bottom-line, Infante says, is that the NCAA has reached the point where trying to regulate grassroots basketball is a lost-cause:

the NCAA’s rules have little effect on when or where prospects play. How quickly experienced head coaches like Reveno and Miller forget what happened with April AAU events. The NCAA banned Division I coaches from going, but the NCAA cannot stop the recruiting media from attending. Just because a player cannot be seen by coaches in person does not mean a tournament is not a good place to be seen period. College coaches then complained about having to appease the same third-parties the NCAA wanted to remove from the recruiting process in order to get information about April events.

The NCAA has reached the limit of what it alone can reasonably do to “fix” AAU. As coverage and even broadcasting of nonscholastic basketball expands, the NCAA’s tools of when college coaches can attend events and which events it certifies are getting less and less useful.


The bottom-line is that the NCAA should be concerned first-and-foremost with building rules that primarily benefit the athletes, but regardless of how they structure July evaluation periods, the prospects are going to be on the road, playing in as many events as possible. The companies that hold these AAU tournaments and exposure camps make their money during these spring and summer months, and as long as the camps and tournaments are profitable, they are going to host as many of them as possible.

The NCAA can only stop that one way, and it’s not going to happen. From Infante:

Unless you are prepared to watch a kid get suspended or ruled ineligible because he played into too many AAU tournaments while chasing a scholarship, the NCAA needs outside help to fix this problem.

You can find Rob on twitter @RobDauster.