Coaches Play Shell Game Of Summer (committments)

[MeanGreen61]

Posted on the Muts board by Space Raider.

Posted on Sun, Jun. 10, 2007

Coaches play shell game of summer

At USC and across SEC, large classes on signing day create season of angst in bid to meet NCAA limits

By JOSEPH PERSON - jperson@thestate.com

In February, with the ink barely dry on national letters of intent, the signing day buzz at South Carolina focused on the number 10.

Steve Spurrier’s third USC recruiting class was the highest-rated group in school history. It cracked the top 10 in the national rankings of every major recruiting service.

Four months later, as the humidity settles over Columbia for the summer, Spurrier is crunching a different set of numbers, trying to find room for the 31-player class while keeping the Gamecocks under the NCAA’s scholarship limits.

It is a shell game played by nearly all Division I schools this time of year, when recruits finish their high school classes and, in some states, mandatory exit exams. As coaches learn which signees failed to make the grade, the coaches make arrangements to place the players in prep schools or junior colleges.

If schools still exceed the 25 scholarship newcomers the NCAA allows each year, coaches will approach signees about “grayshirting,” a relatively recent phenomenon in which players delay their enrollment until January, thus counting against the following year’s scholarship numbers.

While the process occurs everywhere, it appears to take on greater urgency in the Southeastern Conference, whose schools signed more players than any of the other five BCS conferences during the past six years, based on an analysis of recruiting classes from 2002 through 2007.

SEC schools signed an average of 25.1 players per class during that period, according to Rivals.com’s recruiting database and information found on the schools’ Web sites. Big 12 schools had an average of 24.7 signees, followed by the Big East (24.3), Pac-10 (23.2), Big Ten (22.1) and ACC (22.0).

The reasons for the disparity are varied. Coaches and recruiting experts say public schools in the South are likely to produce more nonqualifiers than other parts of the country, forcing teams to sign extra players to account for academic casualties.

Also, schools on NCAA probation — something the SEC is all too familiar with — often try to re-load quickly after the expiration of sanctions, which often include scholarship reductions. That was not necessarily the case at USC, which returns to the full 85-scholarship allotment this year after losing two scholarships the past two seasons for violations that occurred during the tenure of former coach Lou Holtz.

Whatever the reason, Spurrier does not want to make a habit of signing more players than he has spots.

“I certainly haven’t always done that. We don’t like to do that, but sometimes it just happens that way,” Spurrier said this week. “You have a few that you’ve been recruiting and they want to come, so you go ahead and oversign. Then you’ve got to work it out with a grayshirt, or if you have some that you don’t think will qualify, it will work itself out.”

During the past six years, USC has assembled some of the country’s largest recruiting classes, at least among the major conferences. The Gamecocks have signed an average of 27.8 players. Only Oregon State (29.3) and Mississippi State (28.0) have signed more.

Clemson signed 23 players per year during the same period.

Applying simple arithmetic principles to the 85-scholarship limit suggests that schools with the largest signing classes also have the highest attrition rates.

USC’s 28-player class in 2005 was signed three months after the arrival of Spurrier, who dismissed a handful of players for disciplinary reasons and did not renew the scholarships of several others.

This year’s numbers were more a product of momentum. Spurrier landed a couple of unexpected commitments when prep school teammates Ladi Ajiboye and Clifton Geathers, both of whom spurned USC in 2006, contacted USC recruiters and said they wanted to play for the Gamecocks.

Oregon State signed 35 players in February, the fourth consecutive year of 30 or more signees for the Beavers. Including USC, the SEC had four schools with 30-member recruiting classes or larger. Mississippi State (34), Tennessee (32) and Auburn (30) were the others.

Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer could not recall signing a bigger class during 15 years in Knoxville.

“It’s basically to get the upper hand on being able to place a young man that you don’t think is going to make it academically,” Fulmer said. “You can only have so many in a class and an 85 cap, so you just work the process the best that you can — youngsters that you would like to have some say on where he goes to junior college, prep school or wherever.”

J.C. Shurburtt, the Southeast recruiting analyst for Rivals.com, said many of the big schools in the South are forced to go overboard on signing day to offset signees expected to fall short of initial eligibility standards.

“It’s a sad reality that in the Southern states there are more kids that don’t qualify academically,” said Shurburtt, a South Carolina native. “The schools, by signing more than they have, (it) kind of serves as insurance policies.”

A 2005 study by the Manhattan Institute, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that Southern states lag behind the rest of the country in high school graduation rates. Seven of the 10 states with the lowest graduation figures were in the South; South Carolina was ranked last at 53 percent.

Spurrier said “academics” likely were part of the reason that SEC schools signed more players than other conferences. That is not an issue at Vanderbilt, which does not offer scholarships to potential nonqualifiers, according to Commodores coach Bobby Johnson.

Vanderbilt signed an SEC-low 14 players this year and has averaged 21-player classes during the past six years — four fewer than the conference average.

“When I first got to Vanderbilt, our fans came up to me (and said), ‘So-and-so school signs 30 a year and we only sign 18,’” said Johnson, a Columbia native who arrived at Vanderbilt in 2002. “I said, ‘Well, you can only have 85 on scholarship. No matter how many you sign.’

“You’ve got to pare them down somehow. I’d rather have fifth-year seniors coming back playing for me than a hotshot freshman.”

Johnson suspects some schools use big freshman classes to squeeze out unproductive upperclassmen — a practice he referred to as “planned obsolescence.”

“Unless you’re one of those 15 schools that have All-American after All-American lined up — Florida, Southern Cal, Texas — you can’t afford to have two or three defensive backs that can’t play dead in a movie,” Shurburtt said. “You can’t afford to have offensive linemen that don’t work hard in the weight room. So you’ve got to have guys to replace them.”

But Georgia coach Mark Richt dismissed the notion that SEC schools were loading up on players, as legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant and former Pitt coach Johnny Majors did before the NCAA implemented scholarship limits.

“In the end, you’re only allowed 85 at one time, so you’re not stockpiling,” Richt said. “What some people don’t understand is there may be a kid or two within a class that knows if everything hits right on the button that they may end up coming in the next midyear. So they know that ahead of time.

“But then attrition here, attrition there, by the time you get to the first day of class, they all get in.”

It is not always so neat and tidy.

Georgia Military defensive lineman Jarriel King, a North Charleston native who was part of Spurrier’s first USC recruiting class, plans to re-sign with the Gamecocks after failing to qualify two years ago.

This year Spurrier anticipates as many as three signees will come up short academically. That still would leave the Gamecocks a couple of players over the 25-player limit for initial enrollees, perhaps leading to a grayshirt or two.

“We still don’t know exactly who all will be here in September. But we’ve got a very good idea,” Spurrier said. “So far it’s worked itself out.”

Reach Person at (803) 771-8496.

ARTICLE

http://www.thestate.com/188/story/87414.html