New NCAA recruiting rule now in effect

TUSCALOOSA | Coming soon to a high school near you: someone other than Nick Saban.

The University of Alabama’s head football coach won’t be visiting high schools to evaluate recruits anytime soon because of a new NCAA rule that prohibits head coaches from making such on-site visits during the spring evaluation period. Southeastern Conference coaches voted in favor of the rule, which was passed at the NCAA’s convention in January.

The new rule went into effect with the start of the spring evaluation period on Tuesday. The evaluation period concludes at the end of May.

“Now we’ll have to do that in a little bit of a different way,” Saban said Thursday on a teleconference with league coaches. “I’m going to spend a little more time trying to evaluate from afar looking at film.”

Alabama’s assistant coaches will do the legwork in checking out recruits this spring. They will report to Saban, who will make final decisions on which prep prospects will be offered scholarships from a recruiting command post set up at Saban’s office in the Mal Moore Football Building.

“I have looked at every player that we’ve offered,” Saban said. “I will continue to look at and evaluate players. I will communicate from here.”

Saban, by his own count, visited around 100 high schools last spring. A jaunt through Florida to evaluate recruits created a stir when The Miami Herald reported that Saban may have committed secondary NCAA violations by having more than brief, inadvertent contact with recruits. By the time of the annual meeting of SEC coaches later in the spring in Destin, Fla., Saban’s rivals were ready to endorse the new rule that they had previously voted against.

“We probably honestly were our own worst enemy with some people taking advantage of the rule,” Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer said. “When a head coach walks into a high school it almost ends up as an event.”

Said Vanderbilt’s Bobby Johnson, who favors the new rule, “[The non-contact rule] is a hard rule to enforce and I think that’s the only way to do it.”

Saban hinted that the new rule is aimed to keep him from landing another No. 1-ranked recruiting class at Alabama.

“I would rather not answer that but I guess everybody can make their own assumptions about that,” he said.