NCAA Trying To Stem the Tide In Hoops Recruiting

Hiring handlers, coaches, runners and other assorted hangers-on to be vaguely administrative-type basketball folk has been a favorite tactic of skeezy slick-haired basketball coaches for a long time. Tim Floyd hired Daniel Hackett's father to be a strength and conditioning coach and got Hackett as a walk-on because USC pays tuition for its employees. Bob Huggins famously hired Michael Beasley's AAU coach to get Beasley's commitment, making Dalonte Hill (pictured) the nation's highest-paid assistant coach. And virtually everyone John Calipari's ever recruited has had a guy tag along for a well-remunerated position of little import.

Basketball coaches not operating at maximum skeeze don't like this, and they're trying to kill it:

The NCAA intends to prohibit schools from hiring individuals associated with a prospect for two years before or after the prospect's anticipated enrollment. The NCAA's definition of an individual close to a prospect includes parents, guardians, handlers, athletic trainers and coaches.

Another practice -- which has become common, even for mid-level prospects -- is for schools to hire individuals close to a prospect to work at the schools' summer basketball camps. ... To prohibit the payment of fees to individuals associated with a prospect, the NCAA intends to allow schools to hire only its own staff members or enrolled students at its camps and clinics.

The NCAA's also trying to figure out ways to kill the practice of making huge anonymous donations to non-profit (ha!) AAU organizations, though they don't have any good ideas yet. Even if they figure out a way to cut out boosters and coaches from that sort of thing, the NCAA won't be able to stomp it out entirely without government help: earlier this year, Yahoo! detailed a quarter-million-dollar donation to Kevin Love's AAU coach made by an agency attempting to sign Love.

All of this is putting a finger in the dike. Basketball recruiting is and will continue to be sketchy as hell; there's too much money at stake and the important kids are way too obvious for anyone to do anything about it. When Calipari can walk away from a vacated Final Four into one of the plum jobs in the sport, the institutionalized corruption is so extensive that there's little hope for shutting it down.

I guess every little bit helps, though. Moving the money from quasi-legal gray areas into the shadowy underworld is at worst annoying to the people trying to use money to influence big basketball recruits. At best, it might actually bring down more guys like Floyd who flaunt the rules by pushing the quid pro quo into the realm of obvious NCAA violations.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.