Satellite camp ban still a major topic for college football coaches

IOWA CITY — On Friday, the NCAA's immediate ban on satellite football camps was a footnote in its own news release. By Monday, it became a banner headline for every outlet covering college football.

'One curious thing about this whole discussion to me is three years ago, nobody really cared about satellite camps,' Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said Wednesday.

Satellite camps were a way for coaches to provide hands-on instruction for prospective recruits away from their campus. Iowa, for instance, participated in camps near St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit last summer. Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh and Penn State Coach James Franklin became known for working camps at Southern colleges when Southeastern Conference coaches were banned by their league from leaving their campuses.

Mid-major football coaches regularly worked alongside with high-revenue colleagues at camps. Athletes showcased their skills in front of several college coaches, which often resulted in scholarship offers. Some schools held camps and invited rival coaches, like last year when Harbaugh invited Northwestern's Pat Fitzgerald to join his Michigan camp.

SEC coaches and administrators regularly decried the use of satellite camps and forced the immediate ban. According to ESPN, the Big Ten was the only Power-5 conference in favor of satellite camps, while the SEC, Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Pac-12 conferences voted against them. Over the weekend, coaches from leagues that voted down satellite camps told news outlets they disagreed with the decision.

'It appears that the selfish interests of a few schools and conferences prevailed over the best interests of future potential student-athletes,' Washington State Coach Mike Leach told The Seattle Times.

Ferentz said Iowa 'borrowed the idea' of using satellite camps after watching Oklahoma conduct them in Texas. Even with some success — Iowa first became aware of All-American cornerback Desmond King at Detroit's Sound Mind Sound Body Football Academy — Ferentz is the only Big Ten coach to publicly approve of the satellite camp ban.

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'I'd prefer they be done on campuses, and my preference is they be administered and run by people that are personnel of that university and no third parties,' Ferentz said Wednesday. 'I know the benefits of going the other way, but to me that would be a better deal. I know there's been some discussion — at least behind the scenes — about more of a combine-type atmosphere where the college coaches and recruiters would be out of the process and just observing at a combine. So the kids would still get the exposure, the athletes would have a chance to show what they can do, so to speak, but the coaches wouldn't be involved from a recruiting aspect.

'Quite frankly, I think a lot of the satellite camps, they were really motivated more by recruiting initiatives than anything else, and I think that's kind of stating the obvious.'

Like Iowa, Nebraska traveled to satellite camps in major markets like Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles, according to the Omaha World-Herald. It was a primary way to expose the coaching staff to recruits who could not afford or were unlikely to make a long trip to an on-campus summer camp. Nebraska Coach Mike Riley said he expects the topic to resurface, which could result in changes rather than an outright ban.

'We're probably not done talking about it because I do think when it's something that you see as a benefit for young people that we should still keep talking about a way to have those sorts of things,' Riley said. 'In the meantime, we're making plans on how to compensate and what we can do with that time we were going to spend in satellite camps with our own camps here on campus and try to enhance those and make those as good as we can.'

It's possible the ban could be voted down when the Division I Board of Directors convenes on April 28. Based on precedent, that is unlikely.

'I think there's real value in it,' Riley said of satellite camps. 'I do think there's more regulation that needs to be involved with it, whether it's purely the number of those kind of camps that you can have.'

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