Ault takes stand on recruiting practices

By: Juan López

Monday, February 8, 2010 - 11:25 PM

Nevada football head coach Chris Ault said he disagrees with the early signing rule in college football that allows athletes to verbally commit to a school as early as December, even though National Signing Day is not until February. File photo/Nevada Sagebrush

During his press conference Wednesday announcing the Wolf Pack’s 2010 recruiting class, Nevada football head coach Chris Ault touched briefly on verbal commitments he gets from athletes and what they really mean in the world of recruiting.

Ault, who has coached for 25 years and seen pretty much everything college football has to offer, said that he is not in favor of the “early signing rule” in college football.

Basically, the rule states that an athlete can verbally accept a university’s offer of a scholarship as early as December.

But that athlete cannot officially sign with a university until late January, and the official National Signing Day is not until February (It was Feb. 3 this year).

The reason Ault has a problem with this is because he thinks bigger Bowl Championship Series (BCS) schools can toy with an athlete’s emotions and tell them they have scholarships awaiting them.

In reality, they don’t have enough scholarships to give to all the student-athletes they offer them to.

“You can get more verbal commitments than you have scholarships,” Ault said at the press conference.

The way Ault sees this playing out is that bigger schools will tell an athlete that they want to have him play at their university, while in reality they don’t have the room for him and he is not one of their top priorities.

In essence, the schools lie to the athlete in order to prevent them from going somewhere else, in case the school doesn’t get its other prized recruits.

But, because the athlete has been offered a scholarship by a big-time school, the athlete will not even consider smaller schools like Nevada.

“He hangs on because a BCS school said, ‘Oh, no, we got a scholarship for you,’” Ault said. “We, as coaches, know what (these BCS schools) are doing. It’s tough to tell a kid, ‘You’re not a priority.’”

Simply put, these big schools are offering scholarships they do not really have and, in the process, many young athletes are being pulled one way when there really is nothing awaiting them at the schools.

As I listened to Ault say this, his point took a while to sink in, but it made its impact.

Initially, I thought he was being a crybaby and trying to blame the Wolf Pack’s inability to land big-time athletes on the fact that Nevada is a mid-major school and that the system unfairly gives BCS schools a huge advantage.

Then I remembered that coach Ault makes as many excuses as a cow lays eggs.

As his words sank in, I realized he said what he said because he was looking out for the athletes’ best interests, not because he wanted to whine about the lack of big-name recruits at the university.

Although these guys are incredible athletes with inhuman skills, many times we forget that they’re still young, impressionable men.

As one myself, I would hate for a school or entity to tell me that they have something waiting for me that is not truly there.

If anything, it would make me hesitate to trust anyone else offering similar terms.

I’m glad that Ault said this publicly because it really resonated with me even though I’m about as far from being in that situation as humanly possible.

Ault recruits classy young men (for the most part) and just wants people (and schools) to be straight-up.

Kudos to Ault for looking out for the athletes – and I agree, the early signing period only benefits big schools.

Juan López can be reached at jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com.