Football recruiting is like politics. Each has an image problem, and each deserves it.
Some years are worse than others for the reputation of football sales, and the current one has been just awful. In recent days, Colorado’s football program has been hit with allegations of sexual misconduct.
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Minnesota faced reports that recruits engaged in underage drinking and visited strip clubs during official campus visits.
While shocking, none of this should be all that surprising because in recruiting, as in elections, anything goes at some places if it helps you win. Sadly, we’ve come to expect lies and dirty tricks from our would-be public servants. If we still expect more from institutions of higher learning, that may be our fault.
Recruiting, after all, features grown men virtually begging athletic teenagers to accept a free college education for playing a game. It sounds like a recipe for excess, and it often is.
Consider, for example, Miami Carol City linebacker Willie Williams. The Miami Herald followed his recruitment, which included trips on private jets, steak and lobster dinners, a Jacuzzi on the balcony of his hotel room and a police escort.
He described it as “living like King Tut,” and though he is a good student, he seemed more concerned about his host schools’ menus than their course catalogs.
Given Williams’ foray into “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” it’s easy to understand how schools’ recruiting budgets at times exceed $500,000.
Some universities, especially in the South, even utilize female students as recruiting hostesses on visits. The idea is simple: sex sells.
That doesn’t mean hostesses and recruits engage in sexual activity, though a few no doubt do. It does mean that friendly female companionship is a good way to pitch your school.
There’s nothing friendly about the mess at Colorado. It includes lawsuits in which three women say Colorado players or recruits raped them at or following a 2001 party.
In a deposition filed in conjunction with one lawsuit, Boulder County District Atty. Mary Keenan said the university has used sex to entice recruits and did not respond adequately to her complaints about that and recruits’ excessive drinking. Football coach Gary Barnett denied her allegations.
A Big Ten Conference assistant coach said his staff briefs players about how to entertain recruits and tries to monitor activities. In the end, though, coaches have to trust the recruits’ judgment, and in particular the judgment of their hosts.
“It’s a fine line,” the coach said. “You want recruits to get a feel for campus and social life, but in a way that’s appropriate.”
He acknowledged that the Colorado controversy is a wake-up call for recruiters. “I’m sure a lot of staffs around the country are looking at what is going on at recruiting weekends,” he said.
When college athletes face allegations of misconduct, it’s useful to remember that “regular” students get into the same kinds of trouble on any given night on any given campus. But it’s also useful to remember that universities bear an extra burden when it comes to athletes’ behavior because those players enroll or visit at the schools’ request.
Sport does reflect society, with all its ills. Kids get in trouble, and too often it involves booze and sex.
Professional leagues certainly have done their part to send a message cementing that relationship. If nothing else, TV ads have taught us that drinking the right brand of beer will get you the right kind of woman.
It all makes the Janet Jackson Super Bowl fiasco seem less shocking than inevitable.
College athletes, of course, are not pros. Colleges, though, face the same pressures to win and keep the stadiums full that the pros do, and football games at both levels have become programming as well as competition.
That leads us back to recruiting, which Brenda Light Bredemeier, co-director of the Mendelson Center for Sports, Character and Community at Notre Dame, rightly calls an “upside-down” relationship.
“It’s just a shame what programs feel they need to do to attract the best athletes,” she said. “Even to get players on the playing field, we succumb to the pressure to win at all costs.”
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