Senseless Recruiting Rule Gives SEC Powers An Edge

When you’re the Florida Gators or Kentucky Wildcats, you’re far more concerned with choosing from among the top-level freshmen recruits you’ll eventually land to stay on top of the Southeastern Conference than which junior college talent might help keep you there.

The rest of the SEC, however, can use all the help it can get in trying to reach that point.

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That means trying anything with recruiting — even non-traditional routes, like looking at junior colleges — to be as competitive as possible with Florida and Kentucky, which have combined to win the last five (three for Florida) SEC regular season titles and eight (four each) of the past dozen SEC tournament titles.

But that becomes an extremely difficult proposition when a rare, nonsensical recruiting rule stands in the way of that effort.

Such is the case in the SEC, which according to CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish, is in the vast minority of men’s Division I basketball conferences that does not permit its member teams to sign prospects that don’t spend at least three semesters at the JUCO from which they graduated.

No problem for the Gators and Wildcats, who can simply show potential incoming freshmen their championship banners, retool and keep building national championship contenders.

Yet, good luck for SEC bottom feeders like Mississippi State or South Carolina, on up to the trio of squads (LSU, Missouri and Mississippi) that finished .500 in the league, or even Georgia, which tied Kentucky for second-place in the league behind Florida last year.

Of course, that doesn’t entirely prohibit conference non-powers from having good seasons. Tennessee (which finished fourth in the SEC last season) went from the First Four to the Sweet 16 a year ago, and came within three points of meeting Kentucky in the Midwest Regional final of the 2014 NCAA tournament. But only the Gators and Wildcats had the talent to represent the SEC in last year’s Final Four.

Things would figure to stay that way for a while in the conference if the rest of the league isn’t given every reasonable and available recruiting tool afforded to the overwhelming majority of other conferences. Allowing a talented JUCO player — regardless of how much time he spent at which prior college — a chance for middle-of-the-pack SEC teams to level the playing field somewhat with schools like Florida or Kentucky seems to make perfect sense.

After all, any league should always aim for as much competitive balance, from top to bottom, as much as possible. Yet maybe the SEC, whose athletic reputation is built on having the best football conference in America, is happy with keeping the Gators and Wildcats relatively untouchable in basketball, so those teams can keep positioning themselves to reach more Final Fours and add to their national titles, instead of having other SEC schools improve themselves and damage those chances for the league’s two premier programs.

As Parrish pointed out, Georgia’s situation in 2009 was the exact type of instance of how teams other than Florida and Kentucky can be hurt by the SEC’s ridiculous, self-imposed exclusion on enrolling certain JUCO players.

Last year was the best within the conference (and only the second winning season) among the five years Georgia has had under current head coach Mark Fox, who might have had far greater success had he been able to recruit Georgia native Jae Crowder.

Only the SEC’s nonsensical rule prevented that from happening.

"“Jae Crowder is a perfect example,” Fox told Parrish. “He’s a Georgia kid. So I get the job [at Georgia in April 2009], and he’s at Howard JUCO [in Texas], and I’ve got a good contact over there. But he wasn’t eligible for us to recruit.”"

Instead, the 6-foot-6 wing forward, who spent a year each at South Georgia Tech and Texas’ Howard College, went to Marquette, which he took to consecutive Sweet 16s, while being named the 2012 Big East Player of the Year, before the Cleveland Cavaliers selected Crowder as the 34th overall pick in the NBA draft three months later.

If that’s not frustrating enough for coaches like Fox, two other considerations regarding the SEC’s rule might be even more exasperating.

One is the strange caveat to the rule, which states that a player which spends one season at a JUCO after starting his career at a four-year school can play for an SEC team.

Why the line of delineation between that and a player like Crowder, who played one year at two different JUCOs, but not at least three semesters at either one? Only conference overseers who could come up with such an absurd regulation in the first place could explain that one.

The other thing which must be infuriating to SEC teams that are trying to narrow the gap between the Gators and Wildcats is that, as Parrish divulged, even the famous head coaches of those schools — Florida’s Billy Donovan and Kentucky’s John Calipari — are more interested improving their league overall than to maintain a pointless restriction that would largely benefit SEC teams other than their own.

Even if the rule were to be abolished, SEC teams chasing the teams coached by Donovan and Calipari would have to primarily recruit the way Florida and Kentucky do to compete better with those schools.

However, if each SEC team — including Florida and Kentucky — no longer wants the rule, and if the SEC is nearly alone in proceeding with such a limitation, then why continue to have it?

Do what’s right, SEC.

Lift an inane recruiting prohibition that should never have been instituted, allow all teams in your league to do everything they can to be more competitive from top to bottom and finally get on par with most other basketball conferences across the nation.

SEC: Senseless Recruiting Rule Maintains Gap For Conference Powers

By Jonathan Wagner | Sep 11, 2014