Welcome to college football's new 'wild, wild West': The era of tampering
Tampering officially arrived in college football this offseason, leaving coaches to both lament the current state of the game -- and try to keep up.
That tampering is taking place should not surprise anyone. Once the new transfer rule was passed, tampering was as certain as death and taxes.
A couple of excerpts:
It was late December, not yet the end of the season, and already the wolves were circling. An assistant at a high-level Power 5 program knew two of his school's best young players -- one on offense and one on defense -- were being actively recruited by other programs. In fact, he said, it was "unbelievable" how many coaches were reaching out to players on his team's roster.
"The cheaters," the frustrated assistant said, "just keep cheating."
......<Coaches> know if they wait for a quality player to enter the transfer portal to begin recruiting him, they're too late. So they've been reaching out to third parties and using players as go-betweens. It's a violation of NCAA rules, of course, but enforcement is nearly impossible.
An SEC head coach said that not only is tampering happening, "it happens most of the time."
Coaches recognize this shifting reality in which they feel that no one's roster is safe, but there's also a tacit acknowledgement that to survive, one has to play the game.
"You have teams trying to poach kids," an ACC assistant said. "There's a lot of shady s--- going on."
Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz scoffed at the idea of NCAA oversight. It would need to open an investigation, he said, and what good would that do when it still hasn't punished the coaches implicated in the FBI's investigation of college basketball?
SMU coach Sonny Dykes brought up those wiretaps, too. He said he believes the NCAA's inaction is reinforcing the old adage, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."
"You want people in our sport to be ethical enough where they don't fall prey to that," Dykes said, "but ... you got to win and you got a high-pressure job and you have all these things and then all of a sudden, you look up and you go, 'Oh, they didn't punish anybody, and they're not going to punish me. So why not?'"
