Put yourself in a set of different shoes.  You are 17 years old and receiving the attention of top NCAA college football coaches around the country.  You narrow down your choices, you take your maximum three campus visit and make a verbal decision to attend that school.  Then you get a 1oPM phone call from the assistant coach that recruited you who informs you that the head coach is leaving and we’re all going with him.  Want to come with us?

Kiffin Ditched Vols For USC

That was the real world awakening this past January for those kids recruited to play at Tennessee.  Coach Lane Kiffin chose to head off to take over Southern Cal and his assistant coach Ed Orgeron was now telling the very same kids why they should play for Tennessee  just a few days before why they shouldn’t go there now and why USC was the best choice.

Its a nasty party of the college football game and it is a tragedy that 17 year old kids are being caught up in the middle of it.  As college coaches pressure these kids to commit early, graduate in December before your classmate and get yourself to campus for spring practice, those very same coaches are thinking about their next career stop without regard to the kids and parents to whom  promises were made in their living room.

Tomorrow is signing day for recruits, but for some what was supposed to be a joyous occasion has gone sour.  Since the completion of the regular season, 22 coaches are no longer with their respective teams.   Some coaches were fired for performance, others chose to seek out better positions and a few displayed gross misbehavior towards their athletes that sent them packing.  In their wake are the kids now figuring out what to do.

Let’s take the story of Cleo Robinson, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.  An outside linebacker from Haddon Township, NJ, Robinson gave an early commitment to play at Louisville.  Robinson choose Louisville partly because it was the first school to offer him a scholarship and they did so before his senior season.  Robinson never visited the campus of the school.

In late November, Louisville fired its head coach Steve Kragthorpe after three rough seasons.  Kragthorpe made an opportunistic decision to jump from his successful position at Tulsa for opportunity to play in the Big East for a BCS bowl bid.  He replaced another opportunity job seeker named Bobby Petrino who jumped for a job in the NFL and then jumped again during the middle of the season to Arkansas.  A whole lot of hopping going round.

Kragthorpe ended up losing a portion of the recruiting class that Petrino had pulled together and was hampered with a group of players brought in to fit a system that was no longer going to be employed.  While Kragthorpe was able to keep the juniors on the team from departing for the NFL, everything sputtered and the Cardinals fell flat.  Some of those kids lost NFL opportunities because of the coaching shakeup.  Kragthorpe was eventually fired and replaced by Florida University assistant Charlie Strong, who’ll likely be looking for new digs back in the SEC if he generates any success with the Cardinals over his first three seasons.

For Cleo Robinson, he was left in the lurch. With the head coach gone and the system to be employed, Robinson did the smart thing and rescinded his scholarship.  He did so with a lot at risk.  Most other schools have filled their recruiting dance cards and are no longer in market.  Unless you are a blue chip recruit, the decision Robinson made is terribly risky.  Robinson recently committed to Stanford after an official visit, where he will play under head coach Jim Harbaugh.  The irony…Harbaugh has been tied to more head coaching jobs than you can shake a stick at.

So where does the student athlete’s welfare come in?  The student gets pressured to live up to his commitment, he goes to the school, hates it and then transfers out losing a year of eligibility. How do we offer the student more flexibility if the situation around him changes before he even enters his dorm room?

The NCAA needs to begin rethinking the arcane structure that surrounds the recruiting process to eliminate the damage being done by coaches that are looking at the kids as their meal ticket.  When coaches begin calling recruits telling them not to attend class so they can play football at their school, you know something has going horribly wrong with the system.