We all know that Pete Carroll is a tireless recruiter. The amount of energy he puts into this aspect of his job puts him at the top of the list at getting consistent results. He is competitor through and through.
Recently the NCAA decided to curtail the amount of time that coaches could actively recruit in the spring. We wrote about it back in March.
With the first year of this new “dead” period about over the L.A. Times revisits the issue with Pete Carroll.
The so-called "Saban Rule" was adopted this year reportedly after Alabama's Nick Saban, another relentless recruiter, was accused of violating NCAA regulations that prohibit in-person contact with high school players during the spring evaluation period. The legislation, sponsored by the Southeastern Conference, sidelines all head coaches from April 15 to the end of May.
Carroll has complained that the rule penalizes hard-working head coaches while evening the recruiting field for "lazy" ones.
Nevertheless, he was left to fidget, begrudgingly take vacation and throw trademark elbows during campus basketball games while awaiting updates from assistants.
The Trojans' staff reconvened this week to review film and share impressions with Carroll, but the head coach laments, "It's not the same as being out there."
In the months before each of his first seven seasons at USC, Carroll's mission -- his passion, really -- was traveling nonstop during May, hop-scotching to dozens of high schools in Southern California and across the nation, meeting with coaches, shaking hands and chatting up school personnel and evaluating prospects.
Again, its easy to use the NCAA as a punching bag when they make rules that are easily circumvented that still allow “contact” with players even though it is supposedly not “direct”.
Saban and other coaches have recently made video phone calls over computers to communicate with recruits, which the NCAA allows because "all electronically transmitted human voice exchange (including videoconferencing and videophones) shall be considered telephone calls."
Carroll has not ventured into that area of the digital frontier . . . yet. "They've changed the landscape so we have to compete differently," he said.
I have never seen anything more backwards in regards to recruiting than this. Contact is contact. Isn't that why the NCAA put a ban on text messaging?
Pete Carroll will adapt no question and he will continue to one of the games top recruiters. His two websites offer potential recruits to get a feel for Pete Carroll and his style. Of course its not perfect as we saw with the Brennan Carroll video but I give Pete Carroll credit for looking at new ways to get the message out just like Nick Saban has used video conferencing to circumvent the NCAA's stupid rule on direct contact
Once again this shows the NCAA is so out of touch with reality that its not hard to see why they aren't taken seriously in trying to manage their product.