The NCAA's Ban on Satellite Camps Punishes Athletes, Not Big-Time Schools

Rather than tackle the major issues facing college sports, the NCAA—and by extension, its member schools—passed a rule Friday that bans coaches from creating "satellite camps" that could be used for recruiting.

For the past few years, coaches from Midwestern schools have held camps at high schools, primarily in the South, where there is a higher concentration of talented players. Michigan's camps got the most publicity after new coach Jim Harbaugh went on a tour of them, but they weren't alone.

Southern coaches, who naturally wanted to preserve the competitive advantage of being located near so many top recruits, were not fans. Alabama coach Nick Saban called the camps "ridiculous." Clemson's Dabo Swinney compared them to the NFL Combine.

The new ban ignores that the SEC has a built-in advantage, and that the Big Ten should be able to hold its camps wherever it wants. Worst of all, though, is that the rule hurts the very athletes that the NCAA pretends to care about.

While satellite camps were undoubtedly recruiting tools for teams, they were also a great way for athletes to get to know a school and get noticed. Many coaches won't offer scholarships to players until they see them live, and the satellite camps offered a unique opportunity for players to get that exposure.

After the rule was passed, football players from all over the country tweeted that they wouldn't have gotten offers from their dream schools if it weren't for the satellite camps.

That's how I got Boise State and how you can expose yourself to college coaches without paying expenses. Stupid — ❄Deandre Pierce❄ (@its_rayray4)April 8, 2016

In particular, the ban limits options for poor, primarily African-American athletes, whom the NCAA already exploits and disregards in its rule-making.

"The kids, they hook up with these shady characters who drive them around the country in what is basically a beat-up Greyhound bus," Mark Wilson, who ran Ohio State's camps from 2005 to 2012, told VICE Sports. "And they end up spending way more money than their families probably should be."

Some recruits will still be able to attend camps wherever they want, but many can't afford to travel all over the country. They rely on schools to come to them.

Take Alabama, which has a lot of recruits trying to play football and one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. That's where Michigan held one of its satellite camps last season and planned to again this year, inviting coaches at smaller schools from around the region. Now players in Alabama who don't have the resources to travel from school to school won't have as many chances to earn scholarship offers.

"It's unfortunate for the kids," Prattville coach Chad Anderson told AL.com. "I understand (the NCAA's) rationale and reasoning, but I think it hurts the kids in some respect. I guess you can get a little carried away with certain things and overdo things. And that's their idea of making sure they don't overdo this with all the different camps and whatever it may be. But I hate it for our kids."

It's the smaller schools—and, by extension, lower-level recruits who might only get one or two offers—who are punished. Satellite camps were used by schools with fewer resources long before Michigan started using them in order to get a closer look at under-the-radar prospects that they otherwise might not see. For example, South Florida teamed up with Michigan for a camp last year to help spread the word to more recruits. Michigan might have zero interest in some of those players, but they are very attractive to a school like South Florida.

And it makes sense to have the camps where the players are, not where the schools are, as South Florida coach Willie Taggart explained.

"I think the wrong message has been put out," Taggart told SB Nation. "No one's really talking about how good it is for the kids. If you really think about it, this is the right thing to do. Kids are going to camps all over the country, spending all this money to try and get the most amount of exposure, when it's the schools that have all the money."

Smaller programs, from Group of Five FBS schools all the way down to FCS and lower divisions, also use camps hosted by bigger schools as a low-cost way to evaluate talent. Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald said the Wildcats hosted 12 Group of Five schools at their camp last year, which was intended to be a showcase for Chicago players, many of whom were there to get the looks from the smaller schools, not Northwestern.

"For kids that don't have the means especially, we were trying to create this for Chicago kids … now those types of camps are gone," Fitzgerald told VICE Sports. "And there's a lot more of those (small school) prospects than there are Power Five prospects. My concern is there's not a holistic approach to everything we're doing in college football. This is just, in my humble opinion, a kneejerk reaction."

Northwestern never held a camp off its campus, and Fitzgerald said he would have been fine with banning power conference schools from leaving campus. Schools like Michigan already have their pick of the litter in college football, and Jim Harbaugh doesn't need satellite camps to attract recruits. But an all-out ban does nothing but hurt smaller schools and the athletes who are counting on them to get scholarship offers.

"I don't know how that (ban) improves things for kids and their families and gives them better opportunities," Fitzgerald said. "It doesn't."