Question: How many extra phone calls add up to an automobile?
Answer: It depends on your rate plan.
OK, so that question likely will not appear on the next NCAA test all coaches must pass in order to recruit players. And, anyway, if it did, that would not be the correct response.
The real answer is they’re both against the rules. You must not give a car to a player to get him to sign a letter of intent, and you can’t call him as often as you please. The rule book says you can call a prospect once a week. That’s all.
Kelvin Sampson, now the head coach at Indiana, knew the rule. He just decided it mattered less than the other rules. Perhaps the most compelling element to emerge from the NCAA’s resolution of its infractions case against Oklahoma basketball was word that Sampson, the former Sooners coach, had defended excessive recruiting calls by contending they were not as severe as offering material inducements.
He had a point. And still he was wrong.
“Recruiting can hang on the very littlest things,” says Thomas Yeager, acting chair of the NCAA infractions committee. “So in our view, there really are no insignificant recruiting rules.”
Nothing is more important to a program’s success than recruiting gifted players, and coaches are governed by fear of failure as much as by the NCAA rule book. Although it may have led to his assistants’ following instructions, fear of failure did not play into Sampson’s decision. It was more a sense that a smallish matter like an extra phone call would have no impact on his integrity.
As it turns out, those extra phone calls counted for something. Sampson will not be allowed to recruit off-campus or make recruiting calls for one year, a punishment that will have an impact the Hoosiers.
Around the time some of these calls were being made, Sampson was president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, and he was present when the group held its 2003 Ethics Summit. Certainly, the hypocrisy of running an ethics forum while knowingly breaking the rules is hard to take. But it is preposterous to suggest the penalty against Sampson is grounds for dismissal from his new position. When it conducted its coaching search, Indiana was well aware of the case pending against Oklahoma basketball and knew there was a strong possibility sanctions against Sampson would apply during his time at IU.
Indiana determined he was the most effective coach who would take the job, even if he were to spend the early part of his tenure atoning for previous sins. That doesn’t make the school’s administration particularly admirable, just pragmatic. IU decided 577 extra phone calls did not equal an Escalade.
In a sense, this was a perfect marriage.
