Coaches, beware: The NCAA is coming after your Rivals.com subscription

Coaches (like a lot of commenters) love to trash online recruiting sites for overhyping young players, inflating expectations, wrecking evaluations by accelerating the timetable, and so on, but the truth is that every program in the country uses sites like Rivals.com and its competitors in one capacity definition of a "recruiting service" to include online recruiting sites like Rivals, under the rationale that those sites include potentially valuable recruiting information — i.e. highlights, interviews, etc. — that's hidden behind a paywall, and therefore isn't available to the general public. Officially speaking: "All recruiting/scouting services are held to the same legislated standard and we consider Rivals.com to be a recruiting/scouting service."

The upshot is that the NCAA no longer considers those sites "media," which means schools are hereby prohibited from subscribing to them, and required to report a secondary violation if they ever have. Interns, start typing. (Yes, you too, Fax Cam Girl.)

Though the interpretation is bizarre —�Rivals and similar sites don't offer coaches or universities any services they don't offer any random person who plunks down a monthly subscription fee — curbing access to those sites is only collateral damage in the NCAA's ongoing obsession with tagging any and all third parties that might place themselves between supply (recruits) and demand (coaches) in bright red paint.�That particular crusade happens to be heightened at the moment almost entirely due to one Willie Lyles, the former Scout.com employee turned "trainer" who's been effectively singled out as Public Enemy No. 1 over the last month for his using his connections to players and coaches for personal profit, both real and only alleged. In other words, it's not a good time to be a "recruiting/scouting service," even if the actual service you provide is nothing like Willie Lyles'.

In practice, the "crackdown" on recruiting sites (if it even lasts) is likely to amount to little more than a stern look of disapproval. Assuming that a) Coaches still have access to non-subscriber information — which includes extensive player rankings and watch lists and lists of which teams and coaches are involved in recruiting which players, and sometimes information from camps and combines — and b) Violations will rise to the "secondary" level, at best, a ban on Rivals and its ilk is more likely to cause headaches in compliance departments that use the message boards and premium interviews to keep tabs on players and sniff out potential violations than it is to coaches actually attempting to recruit them.

Especially because the coaches have never paid any attention to them, anyway, right? Right.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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