Posted on: Friday, August 6, 2004
Jet setters deplore grounding
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
"This could be a nightmare," Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville sobbed.
"It's a disadvantage," Clemson football coach Tommy Bowden huffed.
Somebody take away their courtesy cars or cancel their country club memberships?
No, the NCAA just pulled the wings on the private jets their schools have used to bring in recruits.
They were preemptive complaints — unsuccessful ones, it turned out — to part of the recruiting legislation adopted by the NCAA's Board of Directors yesterday.
The NCAA's so-called "emergency legislation" package included elements aimed at leveling the recruiting plain, giving recruits a more realistic look at schools and ending recruiting abuses. Gone are the limo rides, hotel suites with jacuzzis and full bars, lobster dinners in four-star restaurants, prostitutes and special flights.
Curiously, one of the most hotly debated items, especially by the power conferences where some schools, such as Georgia, estimate spending $100,000 or more just on private planes, is the ban on the jets to transport prospective recruits.
Schools — particularly those in sparsely populated areas — decry their recruits being forced to resort to commercial flights and, horror of horrors ground transportation. In the case of Auburn (Ala.), for example, some of its recruits will now have to fly into Atlanta and then be driven 100 miles in vans.
"Now, you're going to have an 18-year-old kid going through a big airport and having to change planes for the first time," Tuberville told writers at the Southeastern Conference meetings. "It's mind-boggling they don't look at the safety of these kids."
They're telling us these players are smart enough to be admitted to a prestigious institution of higher learning but they fear they can't find the right airline counter or shuttle even with a map? They can take hits from menace-minded linebackers but not cross airport concourses?
How is the blue-chip quarterback going to find the library, or spot the blitzing safety, if he can't read the Southwest Airlines monitor in the terminal?
What they are really afraid of is that, without limos and private jets to whisk Johnny Touchdown from his doorstep to the locker room at State U., he might find out that two plane changes and a bus ride is reason to scratch the school off the list.
Of course, recruits would eventually confront that problem when it is time to head to school or return from vacation, as regular students do. But, by then, the recruits would already be signed and bound to State U.
As for changing planes and traversing long distances, welcome to the University of Hawai'i's world. Making connections and even enduring canceled flights are things UH, others in the have-not conferences and the recruits who would play for them, have long ago learned to live with.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
