The Ivy League has long served as the incubator for future NCAA rules and policies, and the Ivies have thrown a new experiment onto their subjects.
The league announced Wednesday it has proposed NCAA legislation "to allow prospective student-athletes more time in the recruiting process to make the important decision of where to attend college."
What does that mean in English? One of the proposals is to limit verbal scholarship offers until Sept. 1 of a prospect's junior year. That also means no phone calls between coaches and prospects and no recruiting dialogue at camps and clinics until that date.
“We’re trying to close those loopholes,” Ivy League executive director Robin Harris told Inside Higher Ed. “The current culture is putting more and more pressure on prospective athletes to commit, because they’re talking to coaches and making unofficial visits earlier and earlier. You think about freshmen and sophomores and how much they still have to grow, physically, athletically, academically, emotionally, and our concern is that prospects are making decisions they come to regret.”
The Ivy League bases its rationale on the NCAA's research that 33 percent of student-athletes transfer during their college careers. Delaying the recruiting process, they argue, will lead to more well-informed decisions.
“There’s a lot of talk about there being a transfer problem,” Harris said. “Well, I would say a lot of the problem with transfers is the fact that we have individuals making decisions too soon that are too rushed.”
The proposal is just that: a proposal. It would need to pass through the various bureaucratic checkpoints of the NCAA voting process, starting with the organization's annual convention in January.