NCAA Recruiting--Will ‘Death Penalty’ End the Scandal?

For Paul Palek, the coach at Bloomfield High, Ala Abdelnaby was a first--a blue-chipper, a super basketball player. So was the deluge of college recruiters. So, too, was the seamier side of recruiting.

Dozens of schools wanted the 6-foot-10 1/2 New Jersey star. Duke got him. Maryland didn’t, even though Palek said it dangled a lot more than the traditional scholarship in front of the kid.

“Maryland offered me a job as an assistant coach,” Palek said. “One of their assistant coaches, in a phone conversation, Ron Bradley, he said there was an assistant position open and would I be interested. He asked me what my salary was, I told him, he said the job paid more than that and asked me, ‘Would you and Ala like to come to Maryland?’

“It was flattering, but what if I did take it? Then, three years later, another 7-footer they’re interested in comes along and I’m out of a job.”

Bradley denied offering Palek a job and, in fact, said Palek had asked if an assistant’s spot was available. And, as Maryland’s head coach, Charles (Lefty) Driesell, said: “I can hire anybody I want. . . . There’s nothing illegal about it, absolutely nothing wrong. It’s not even questionable.

“It’s done all the time.”

As odd as it may appear, offering a job to a coach, parent or anyone else in hopes of landing a player is permitted under NCAA rules. Giving the player a ride to the campus from the airport or a hamburger along the way--or paying him to play--is not.

Both the out-of-place and the outright out-of-bounds have been going on in college recruiting for decades. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn., which draws up the rules, tries to enforce them. As often as not, by the NCAA’s own admission, it fails.

“I would not say we’ve been a total failure,” said Steve Morgan, head of the NCAA’s enforcement and compliance department. “But what has been missing, at least until recently, is a clear commitment on the part of the membership that they want things restored to order, that they want a significant enforcement effort to assist those institutions who want to comply.”

As the money to be made from--and spent on--a winning sports program escalates, college presidents and athletic departments are saying with an increasingly loud voice that they want to save their schools from further scandals.

Last summer, the NCAA adopted legislation that imposes mandatory suspensions of anywhere from one game to two years for programs caught with two major violations in a five-year period. It was quickly dubbed the “Death Penalty.”

Adoption of the measure, with only three schools dissenting, was an important step toward cleaning up the recruiting process, according to Morgan.

“For the first time in a while, we’ve got a clear, overwhelmingly supported statement that rules compliance is what the administrators want, and that meaningful, significant penalties are what they want,” he said.

The “Death Penalty” has yet to be imposed on a violator. Already, however, some wonder if it’s tough enough.

“What if you’re investigated twice in six years? Does that mean you’re clean? If they’re serious, one investigation should be enough,” said Frank Broyles, athletic director at the University of Arkansas.

Besides the “Death Penalty” and various mutations, proposals to deal with recruiting scams range from paying the players on the record, to giving investigators subpoena power, to making it a federal crime to illegally recruit a college athlete. And the blame is placed everywhere, from greedy administrators to overzealous boosters right down to the athletes themselves.

The “Death Penalty” was approved shortly after the NCAA cited the University of Florida’s football program for 107 violations of recruiting rules. Florida was placed on up to three years of sanctions, including a ban on TV and bowl appearances, and the Southeastern Conference declared the Gators ineligible for league football championships, which they would have claimed last year.

Florida fired its football coach, Charley Pell, and went out front in the crusade to clean up college sports.

“I think we went through a period of transition in the Florida case,” Marshall Criser, the university’s president, said. “Before then, these matters were of low visibility, enforcement was not consistent and penalties were rather mild.

“The publicity in the Florida case brought people’s attention to the fact that it was rather a widespread problem. I don’t think any president, any athletic director, wants to have the kind of problems in the future that we’ve had in the past,” Criser said. “It’s not worth the risk. I believe the NCAA is serious now, and I applaud that.”

The latest effort to clean up college sports comes amid a flood of cases in which athletes admit receiving money to play as amateurs and highly regarded alumni suddenly resign from the boards of trustees while acknowledging that they made such payments.

Texas Christian University’s football program, an up-and-coming one, lost nine players this season in a play-for-pay case. One of the players, Kenneth Davis, was a solid contender for the Heisman Trophy.

Tito Horford, a highly touted basketball player, committed himself to the University of Houston. But when it turned out the school had recruited him illegally, he left and turned up at Louisiana State. He has since left LSU, too.

Georgia’s basketball and football programs are on probation because of recruiting violations.

The University of Kentucky has been jolted by stories that 26 of its players over the past 13 years received hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

The scandals spread because football and basketball are big business, with millions of dollars funneled by television to the schools. A bid to a football bowl game or a basketball tournament can mean the difference between red and black ink on the bottom line of a college’s books.

Villanova, Georgetown, St. John’s and Memphis State received $751,899 apiece for reaching the Final Four in the NCAA basketball tournament last March. The teams that get that far next March will each receive an estimated $835,300, the NCAA said. First-round losers in the tournament now receive far more than the $133,381 UCLA got for winning the national championship in 1975.

The Orange Bowl in Miami and the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans each will pay the two competing schools $2.25 million apiece to play football on New Year’s night. The Cotton Bowl in Dallas will pay each school better than $2 million. The Rose Bowl, the richest of the postseason football games, will pay each school $6 million. Even the Cherry Bowl, a new and relatively obscure game in Pontiac, Mich., will pay each school $1.2 million.

What’s an investment of a car, a stereo, a wardrobe--a few hundred bucks or a few thousand--when a school can get a shot at that kind of payoff?

“I was offered things like cars, trips for my mother to the school that I was going to be attending, furs for her, girls, money,” Irving Fryar, former Nebraska star receiver now with the National Football League’s New England Patriots, said of the recruiting he faced when he was in high school.

“A few recruiters told me, ‘Whatever it takes to get you, you’ve got it,’ ” David Butler of Coolidge High School in Washington, D.C., said. He didn’t identify them. He also hasn’t decided where he’s going.

Broyles said there are simply “more rewards for winning.”

“There are more schools trying to be competitive,” he said. “Twenty years ago, people accepted their role more willingly. Twenty-five schools have moved into Division I who want to compete in basketball with LSU, Kentucky, North Carolina and Indiana. How are they going to do it?

“Everything is bigger than it ever has been in college sports. The most expensive expenditure is empty seats. When you win, you fill them. It’s a vicious cycle. It could consume the whole establishment.”

Darryl Rogers, former head football coach at Arizona State and now coach of the NFL’s Detroit Lions, believes “that there’s an unwritten thought about an awful lot of coaches--that you’ll get fired for losing before you get fired for cheating.”

Adds Frank McLaughlin, the Fordham University athletic director: “Winning and the money that comes from winning have become far more important than educating the player,”

Last March, basketball star John (Hot Rod) Williams was arrested in a point-shaving scandal at Tulane. He had to have his rights read to him. Williams, a senior, couldn’t read.

Since 1952, the NCAA has taken 300 “public actions” against Division I schools, about 20% of that number being reprimands rather than sanctions. That means that in the other roughly 240 instances, sanctions were imposed.

The NCAA’s Division I has 284 member schools. Thirteen of them are on probation. One of the athletic departments, Arizona State, is being penalized for violations in three sports--baseball, wrestling and men’s gymnastics.

David Berst, of the NCAA’s enforcement arm, says it is investigating allegations into 30-40 rules violations. That number, he says, is the norm.

At a time of richer and richer rewards for winning in college sports, the price of success is going up, too.

Wilt Chamberlain, the most dominant college basketball player of his time, said last month that when he played at Kansas University from 1955-59 he was paid about $4,000 in cash by “two or three godfathers. . . . Everyone was assigned at least one godfather when I was at Kansas.”

Davis, a running back who finished fifth in last year’s Heisman Trophy balloting, was bounced from the TCU team after admitting he received between $18,000 and $23,000 of a promised $38,000 from booster Dick Lowe.

Recruiters and coaches estimate the going rate for a top-quality high school recruit is $10,000-$20,000. Walter Byers, for 35 years the executive director of the NCAA, says even the top of those estimates is too low.

And Byers believes that “there seems to be a growing number of coaches and administrators who look upon NCAA penalties as the price of doing business--if you get punished, that’s unfortunate, but that’s part of the cost of getting along.”

Lowe, in the oil and gas business in Fort Worth, said he was first approached by a TCU assistant coach five years ago and asked to recruit athletes.

“My first mistake is I let myself be convinced that everybody was buying players and it was the only way that TCU had a chance to compete,” Lowe said.

Before long, 29 players were on the take, Lowe said. That was during the era of Coach F.A. Dry, now an assistant coach at Baylor. He was replaced at TCU in 1983 by Jim Wacker.

“I was totally delighted when Coach Wacker came in and said he was going to clean it up,” Lowe said. “An assistant coach, a member of the prior staff (whom he wouldn’t identify), came to me and said if they don’t continue to get payments, they would quit and turn TCU in.”

Of the 29 players, he said, 20 were dropped from the payroll and convinced to remain silent. The remaining nine continued to get paid until the scandal broke last September.

“In my opinion, the abuses are widespread,” Lowe said. “Some (coaches) think it’s a way of life, just the way college football is, that cheating is the only way to keep up with the rest of them.”

Broyles said the most positive thing to come out of recent attempts to clean up college athletics was Wacker’s “getting players to confess. He did a good job. Honesty is most important. These boys believed it. They felt so badly, they confessed. That’s never happened before. . . . Before, everybody tried to hide what they had done.”

Wacker downplayed Broyles’ praise.

“It was one kid who went to one assistant,” he said. In other words, eight others did not.

Coaches and administrators often blame boosters for recruiting problems and wail that they have no control over the alums. Others say the boosters are not the only ones at fault.

One midwest college recruiter and assistant coach, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that when a high school star becomes particularly interested in a certain college, “the school will get a booster involved and there’ll be some kind of cash inducements.

“There are plenty of places where the presidents know about it. But more often it’s the coach who’s directly involved. Or else he leaves it up to his assistants. But the money’s not coming out of his pocket. It’s got to be coming from someone who’s got that kind of cash. So somebody’s sort of assigned--or takes it upon himself--to go to a booster and say, ‘We need this kid; go and get him.’ . . . It’ll never all stop because there’s always going to be somebody looking for the edge.”

“You’ve got to get the boosters out,” Broyles said. “Coaches look the other way. I don’t believe one of 1,000 boosters does anything illegal without a coach first saying, ‘We need your help.”’

“There’s no place for boosters in the competition for athletes,” Lowe said. “Alumni get to believing they’re part of the competition (on the field). What they ought to be doing is contributing money to building funds and such. But they get caught up. You want your team to beat the team of your business partner or your golf buddy.”

John Thompson, who led Georgetown to three Final Four appearances in the past four years, is among a group of coaches generally perceived as staying within the rules while building national powers. He feels the problems in college athletics reflect more widespread troubles.

“The media has done a thorough job of making it appear that college basketball is one big scandal after another,” Thompson said. “These things are in the makeup of our society and not just of college athletics.”

“If you survey 1,000 people who run businesses, you’ve probably got 10% of them that are crooks,” said Gene Bartow, athletic director and basketball coach at the University of Alabama Birmingham. “If you survey people in medicine, you’ve probably got 5-10% . . . It’s part of life.”

Bartow became UCLA’s head coach when John Wooden retired in 1975. Two years later, Bartow quit and took the job at UAB. He said it was because of the pressure. He also was unable to control a few alumni, some of whom had been deeply involved in the basketball program since the Lew Alcindor era.

On the agenda for the NCAA’s annual convention next Jan. 13-15 in New Orleans are 110 proposed rules changes. Fifteen of them deal with recruiting, and the first of those would “prohibit any recruiting of athletes by boosters alumni or other persons not employed by an institution.”

Boosters can now recruit on campuses, but not off.

Other recruiting proposals would redefine contacts with recruits, player tryouts and transportation to and around the campus.

The 110 proposed changes, incidentally, are the fewest in five years.

“There are too many rules,” Al McGuire, former Marquette coach and now an NBC basketball announcer, said. “They’ve got to get simpler rules.”

McGuire said the rules, especially those allowing telephone contact, favor the established powers.

“Schools that want to break into that can’t compete, so they cheat,” he said. “The rules of the last 5-10 years favor the haves. Before, you could outwork them. Not now. You want to clean it up? OK, split all the money among all the Division I schools. You want to equalize recruiting? Eliminate the phone calls.”

Dale Brown, LSU’s basketball coach, suggests the best way to ease the must-win pressure would be to admit every Division I school to the postseason tournament.

“All the money from the first-round games should be shared equally with all the teams,” he said. “All the money from the second-round games should be directed towards a fund to expand the athletic scholarship. The remaining portion of the tournament can now be run like the present format.”

He also proposed paying each scholarship athletes $100 a month for “essential needs” such as notebooks, pens, pencils, laundry and snacks.

Other coaches and athletic directors also advocate a stipend for athletes, either $50-$100 to everyone or handed out on a need basis.

“The service academies and Ivy League do it. It helps eliminate temptation,” Broyles said. “We had it but it was eliminated in 1973 or ’74. It was $15 laundry money, When I was in school in the ‘40s, it was $10. But the cost of living has gone up.”

Not everyone agrees that money is the answer.

“I’d never go for paying players,” Wooden, the winner of 10 national championships at UCLA in the 1960s and ‘70s. “In many ways, intercollegiate athetics do the athletes an injustice by doing too much for them--getting them jobs during vacation periods, making sure they have tutoring at all times, playing around with their class schedules.

“We are taking away the incentive of the individual. In many cases it hurts them when they’re out and gone. Paying them would only make it worse.”