It’s Legal, but is it Ethical?

At the end of the day, that is the fundamental question when discussing oversigning. By virtue of the way the NCAA by-laws are written and the structure of the 85/25 scholarship rules, there is no question that coaches, by NCAA rules, are allowed to sign as many players as they want (in fact the NCAA places no limits on the number of players that can be signed), as long as only 25 new scholarship players are added each year and no more than 85 scholarship players are on the roster at one time. Those that have been following this site already know all of this, as we have talked about it and debated it many times here.

For those just reading this site for the first time, we have taken a look at the restrictions some conferences have added to the signing process to prevent the practice of oversigning and we have looked at some conferences that until just recently have had no such restrictions and that blatantly oversign. There is no question that there are two schools of thought on this topic and that fans are just as passionate about this topic as they are about recruiting rankings and the games played on the field.

We ran across a wonderfully written article on oversigning and whether or not it is ethical at www.athlonsports.com.  If you follow this site and this topic then this is a must read article, as it touches on all of the main talking points when it comes to oversigning, including comments from high school coaches upset that their players were victims of oversigning, something that detractors of this site claim doesn't exist.  We're not sure when the article was written, but based on the comments from the coaches in the article our best guess is that this was written somewhere around 2003.

Let's take a closer look at the article (warning, this is a long, but very informative read - you might want to get a cup of coffee or something before you dive into this):

Click the link to continue reading >>>  

The quotes below are from this article: http://www.athlonsports.com/college-football/5471/oversigning-is-it-ethical

It's an accepted practice, though, that faces little challenge. Further, there are reasons to believe oversigning is beneficial; it allows teams to maintain their full contingent of players, thus maximizing the number of student-athletes reaping the benefits that come with a college football scholarship.

This is another indicator that the article is a little dated because the practice of oversigning is now facing a very strong challenge, thanks in small part to this site. 

There are no reasons to think that oversigning is beneficial, other than giving coaches a loophole to build stronger teams faster, but that comes with a price because the more you sign the more have to go.  And as for the benefits of maximizing the number of student-athletes reaping the benefits that come with a football scholarship, it is our belief that you don't have to oversign to ensure all of the scholarships are used.  Each team has a pool of walk-on players that have been with the team and the scholarships should go to them.  The best and most ethical solution is to give the remaining scholarships you have, should you have an unexpected shortfall (meaning a career-ending injury during the spring or a kid wanting to transfer because he is home sick or for legit personal reasons), to the 4th or 5th year walk-on players that have earned a reward.  This ensures that scholarships are used and it doesn't commit the school to a player for 4 years.  It is the correct win-win solution to making sure all scholarships are used - oversigning to ensure all scholarships are used is nothing more than gambling with players lives, which we deem as unethical.

The fickle whims of high school football stars are well-documented, but when combined with the fact that their academic status is sometimes difficult to pin down, it becomes clearer why oversigning is an exception that the NCAA allows.

"They have to (allow it), to keep the numbers at 85," West says. "Because unless you drop all academic requirements, (if) I have four slip away and now I'm at 81. How do you know if they aren't going to qualify? I don't have a crystal ball."

It's a process that has existed since schools were first limited in the number of scholarships they could hand out, according to Damani Leech, an NCAA associate director of membership services.

"It allows them to exceed the limit as long as they don't end up with more than the maximum 25," Leech says. "Institutions are allowed to hedge their bets, so to speak. A lot of times until that final day of signing they don't know exactly who's coming."

Oversigning can even occur when a team signs fewer than 25 players in a class, because teams often have to be aware of attrition among upperclassmen, for a variety of reasons. West entered last spring with 91 players but knew that by the fall he'd lose several players to academic issues.

"Usually we oversign enough so that we don't end up short when all the dust clears," says South Carolina defensive tackles coach Paul Lounsberry. "We realize that some on the team may not make it. It's a liquid number that you have to play around with."

Again, the NCAA does not have to allow oversigning, and they shouldn't.  This makes absolutely no sense.  Why should the NCAA allow a school to oversign borderline players that have a high percentage of not making it in just to enable schools to get to 85 when there is a pool of academically qualified, in fact close to graduating, players already available???

The NCAA is just wrong here and the rules need to be changed.  If their mission is to make the most out of the student-athlete's experience, then they have no business allowing school to hedge their bets on academically borderline students.  It's sending the wrong message to kids.  The message should be that if you want to get a football scholarship you have to be able to do more than just play football, you have to be able to handle the regular coursework of a college student and in order to be able to do that you need to have your academics in order well before your senior year of high school.

As for Paul Lounsberry, it is not a liquid number.  Every coach in the country knows exactly how many openings they have on National Signing Day, and they shouldn't sign a single player over that number, period.

Oklahoma State coach Les Miles and his staff signed 31 players in February.

"This is easily the best recruiting class we've had since I've been here," says Miles of his third class as the Cowboys' head coach. "I've been at Michigan, Colorado, and I think it compares favorably to a number of great recruiting classes I saw at those places."

So what happens to the extra players? Coaches have several options when trimming down to the allowed numbers of 25 and 85, and the two most popular are sending academic non-qualifiers to junior colleges (ideally to be retrieved in two years), and scholarship deferral. Coaches commonly ask borderline prospects to enroll the following January. This practice, called "greyshirting," forces the player to miss out on the fall, but he gets in an extra spring practice without losing eligibility.

Miles' class includes an unusually large number of players who will have to defer or attend junior college, but the coach says it's something those players understood up front.

"We try to identify the best people we can," Miles says. "If some are good people and deserve an opportunity to be at a four-year college, we get them. If they can't get in we send them to a junior college with the opportunity to get them back in two years. Not only that, but we've signed some who qualified though they weren't predicted to."

That's a good thing, but doesn't that point to the danger involved in oversigning?

"Well, it's their responsibility to qualify, but if they don't, we'll have a plan for them," Miles says. "They realize this school is looking forward to bringing them back in two years."

Miles says he actually ran out of room and responsibly cut off recruiting. He adds that the practice is mandatory because of academic regulations, and he sees no reason to curtail oversigning.

"How do you determine (academic status)?" Miles says. "The teacher said he was taking enough courses, but he doesn't qualify. What are you supposed to do, eat that scholarship? That doesn't make sense to me, and not to the players, either. My way of thinking, you can only have 25. We all know that, and we abide by those rules. You're better off being allowed to recruit aggressively until the final day.

Well of course it was the best recruiting class, who wouldn't want to be able to sign 31 guys and make absolutely sure that you get 25 new stud recruits.

Here's the problem with sending large number of players off to JUCO, not all of them are coming back and it is a tactic that is used to ensure that player doesn't sign with a rival school who might have different admission rules and might be able to get the player in.  Instead, the coach sends them off to JUCO with no real guarantee that they will be back in two years.  It's one thing to send a guy off to military prep school for 1 year while he gets his academic house in order, and for the school that is doing that to hold his scholarship spot open while he is doing that, but to send a guy off to JUCO and then sign another player to his spot is just wrong.  Furthermore, this the farm-league mentality that Ole Miss and almost all SEC schools use.  Something that schools like Notre Dame, Michigan, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, etc.,etc, can't even use because JUCO credit rarely transfer to those institutions. 

Of course Les Miles sees no need to curtail oversigning, he's in a conference battling with schools that are the highest abusers of oversigning.  But here again it is a matter of ethics.  Mark Richt at Georgia has taken a stance on oversigning and refuses to do it, despite having to compete against teams in the SEC that are the heaviest abusers of the practice.

There is a flip side to the issue. All those numbers on paper are real people who can get hurt by the process.

Tennessee high school football coach Carlton Flatt has seen it.

Flatt, the coach at Nashville-area power Brentwood Academy, understands that attrition from injuries and transfers happens in football and that schools need to keep their rosters full. But he's also seen what happens when colleges covet one too many and later decide to make a change.

"I had a child pushed out, and I didn't like that at all," Flatt says. "There's still some resentment over that."

He declines to identify the player by name, but says he was a kicker in the early '90s who signed with Florida State and played one season. But when the Seminoles had three kickers in camp, they decided one had to go.

Florida State coaches have since returned to the talent-rich Tennessee school, but not without hearing from Flatt.

"I told them I wanted them to know I was doing my best not to have hard feelings, because I didn't want my feelings to interfere with (the recruiting process)."

Another high school coach in north Mississippi tells a story about one of his players who got pushed out in a regime change.

According to the coach, who asked that neither he nor the player be identified, an SEC school hired a new coach who was more interested in bringing on board his own players than dealing with the players left by the former staff. The player was one of seven whose scholarships were rescinded.

The coach says he was told it had nothing to do with any irregularity, but that the new staff simply didn't feel the player was talented enough to play at the school.

"When you take a job, you inherit what's there," the coach says. "You're talking about 18- and 19-year-old kids. It just seems unfair, but maybe it's an unfair business. Maybe that's the problem, that it's more of a business now than the original premise on which it was based."

Kids are being pushed out, it's just not mainstream, everyday headline news.  At least not yet.  We also tend to see oversigning abused the most when there is a coaching change.  It's the age old chicken or the egg debate, does being able to oversign breed coaching turnover or does coaching turnover breed oversigning?  There is only one way to find out, eliminate the oversigning and make it harder on coaches to come in and gut a roster and win a national championship in 2-3 years with a completely new roster.  Just look at the difference between the SEC and the Big 10; the rate of oversigning and coaching turnover go hand in hand, as do the number of national championships over the last 10 years. 

This is college athletics, not semi-professional sports.  There should be more coaches like Joe Paterno and less like Houston Nutt and the other coaches that jump jobs every 5 years or so.  There is something to be said for having a stable, long-term coaching staff, especially when it comes to determining what is best for the players. 

Oversigning presents coaches with myriad temptations they wouldn't face if it didn't exist. Older players teetering on the brink of academic failure might get more tutoring instead of being shoved out the door for the next available freshman. And nothing prevents the use of oversigning as a ticket to free positive publicity of a top-rated recruiting class from the multitude of media, who often don't take into account that five members of a 30-player class won't see the field next fall.

Despite the fact that a letter-of-intent implies a commitment, there are no guarantees that a player who ends up in a junior college will be welcomed back to his original school.

"That's very common," says Pasadena City College coach Tom Maher, who operates within the vast California junior college system. Many of his players go on to successful Division I-A careers, but some never get that chance.

"Kentucky placed a kid here," Maher says, not revealing the player's name. "A cornerback who wasn't fast enough. We had to move him to safety. They didn't want him back."

Schools have no obligation to honor that original letter of intent.

This just further illustrates our point that these players that are shoved off to JUCO have very little chance at coming back to the schools they were originally signed to in the first place.  We feel as though the NCAA should amend their by-laws and stipulate that if a schools wants to sign a player but wants to send him to JUCO to get his house in order, the very least they should be required to do is honor their commitment to him and hold his scholarship until he is ready to participate.  The day that happens though, will be the day you see schools stop signing kids and placing them in JUCO. 

Players who leave haven't always been forced out, either. Some Big Ten football coaches made this case to conference officials, and starting with the last recruiting class were granted the ability to sign three over the maximum number allowed.

"Football is a larger pool of players, so there's more natural attrition," Lister says. "That's why we decided to allow what we allow now, three over the maximum. Schools will be accounting for any non-renewal of scholarships."

New Big Ten head coach John L. Smith recently jumped from Louisville in Conference USA to Michigan State, but he says the new restrictions he faces are fine.

"Normally you can't oversign more than the Big Ten allows us to, anyway," Smith says. "Too much oversigning will make you a roller coaster football team. Why would you want to try to sign 28? Because after a while you'll have to have a much smaller class, and you'll go from 28 seniors to eight or 10, and you're only as good as your seniors. The only time a coach wants to do that is when he's under pressure to win now, and he needs to fill the cupboard just to save his job."

John L. Smith was exactly right, and as one reader of this site pointed out, LSU is about to face that roller-coaster ride with their recruiting classes.  

Also you may be interested to know that LSU only has 9 seniors on this years upcoming team. And guess how many recruits LSU has committed so far….11. Already over by 2 for next year…and it’s only June! They will be signing many more.

 Back to the main article, Smith also hits the nail on the head with his comments about the only reason you would sign 28 players a year is when he is under the pressure to win now.  We did a piece on coach comparisons a while back, but here is the table we created:

National Championship Coaches 2002 - 2010

There is no question that coaches under extreme pressure to win right away will do everything they can to gain an advantage, after all they are being paid millions and millions of dollars to do so and that kind of money doesn't come without tremendous pressure.

Yet there are a handful of schools, like Vanderbilt, that are severely limited in their access to the rule because of high academic standards.

"People oversign because they want a guarantee they'll get (25)," Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson says. "There's always a danger that you'll get right down to the end and there's one guy you're saving a scholarship for who's not telling you until signing day what he's going to do. You've got to save a scholarship, because if you have 25 committed and he comes, too, you've got 26, and since all of them will get in here there's no way we can reduce it. It makes it a little tougher on us."

Yet even the Commodores aren't ready to toss it overboard.

"I agree with it," Johnson says. "It sort of protects (other schools) and gives them a chance to get a full class. As long as they have 25 in the end, they are working within the rules."

But say the NCAA one day bans oversigning? "I wouldn't cry over it," Johnson says flatly. "I think it would help us."

SEC associate commissioner Greg Sankey says his league keeps constant watch on all recruiting issues.

"It's being talked about and monitored by the league, but it's obviously not something we've set a formal policy on at this time," Sankey says. "Those issues have been discussed, although I'm not sure about specifics. It's something I know is a topic of conversation. It's discussed among faculty athletic representatives. I think it's an issue we'll continue to monitor, and one that should continue to be discussed nationally, also."

Leech says the NCAA doesn't have an opinion on the issue because it's legal and because it has not faced any challenges. Every time a rule is questioned, the NCAA comes up with an interpretation for the given situation. He knows of no interpretations of the oversigning rule, leading him to conclude that it hasn't been questioned much. He knows of no proposals before the NCAA seeking to alter oversigning rules, either.

So if Vandy doesn't oversign and operates in a similar manner to many universities around the country and Vandy's head coach believes that if oversigning were to be banned that it would help them compete, then the same should hold true for the rest of the country that doesn't do it.  Schools like Georgia, Georgia Tech, the entire Big 10 conference, Stanford, etc., etc.  It's pretty obvious that Vandy's coach was being as diplomatic as possible with his comments given that he resides in the SEC.

Since this article has been written the SEC implemented a rule in 2010 that limits the number of players signed to 28, but it lacks the stipulation that coaches be required to prove where a scholarship is coming from before the letter of intent is signed and that no one from the returning class of players be pushed out for the sole purpose of bringing in better recruits.  Nor does the SEC rule stipulate that the extra players signed must qualify academically, all things that the Big 10 rules, that have been in place FOR DECADES, provide for.

This is where the 1-year scholarship renewal loophole comes into play.  This is the loophole that enables coaches to cut existing players by not renewing their scholarship, and it is clear that there are two divided sides on this topic.  The line of demarcation is almost as clear as the line separating the right-to-work states from the forced-unionism states. 

Regardless of where you stand on right to work issues and regardless of what section of the country you live in and who you root for come football season, we think it is pretty clear that something needs to be done about oversigning.  It is doing more harm than good and the only people truly benefiting from this are the coaches with the million dollar contracts.  This is especially true when there is a perfectly acceptable, and already practiced, solution to the problem of oversigning to ensure you have 85 scholarship players.  That solution being the rewarding of a scholarship to a walk-on player that has proven that he can get it done in the classroom and has something to contribute to the team on the field.

There is no place for hedging with players lives in college athletics.  Let's hope the NCAA see the error of their ways and changes the recruiting by-laws to prohibit oversigning and encourage the rewarding of walk-on players who have truly earned the right to a scholarship.

Thanks for reading!