The Solution to NCAA Recruiting Troubles

In light of the most recent batch of recruiting mishaps, this time involving the pristine Connecticut Huskies and Jim Calhoun, we are once again reminded of how recruiting violations are not just rarely committed deeds. I am positive that if the NCAA examined every single Division-I school, they would find all sorts of recruiting violations at big schools and small schools. The thing is, it seems almost commonplace for coaches to allege that the "had no idea it was going on", and that there is seemingly no way to police these schools to keep everyone in-line with the rules of recruiting.

So I got to thinking about this issue, and thought of something. What if the NCAA created/immensely improved on a division of people whose only jobs were to monitor each school's recruiting progresses? They would do this by tapping the coaches' phone lines, and handing out registered cell phones to the coaches explicitly for recruiting, with pre-set limits on minutes and text-messages, and with the ability for the all-powerful NCAA to monitor the call history and text history of each phone.

Now, I know that this seems like a complete invasion of privacy but it would completely eliminate any possible excuse that a coach could use to get around this system, particularly why they made x many more phone calls to a recruit than the NCAA limit. Then, if a coach went outside of these guidelines, it is not a matter of whether he knew these 'evil recruiting deeds' were being done or not, seeing that he had to know if he took the steps to avoid using the NCAA registered and tapped phones.

Personally, I think that UConn will receive a minor punishment. I do not think that they will receive Indiana-esque sanctions, since Nate Miles was already expelled from the University but also never played a single basketball game while he was there, so no wins or tournament titles could really be taken away from Connecticut. I think that they will have a restricted number of scholarships, which hampers a coaches recruiting efforts since the overall size of he recruiting pool has not changed yet the key draws to his program are more limited than they were before, so he must be more selective in his recruiting process and possibly miss out on a few big-time recruits.

The NCAA needs to take some sort of measure to try and combat the ease with which schools get away with these 'recruiting atrocities', or they need to just get rid of the rules alltogether since we will never be able to fully tell who is really abiding by the rules and who is not.