Football, Fun, And An Unintentional NCAA Recruiting Violation: A Day at Jim Harbaugh's Satellite Camp

There are no traffic lights at these so-called satellite camps for high school football players, nothing to stop the busy intersection of recruits and coaches and rules.

So it was that Jim Harbaugh, the University of Michigan coach, committed a National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting violation right in front of me Thursday morning at one of the so-called satellite camps in Atlanta.

I have no doubt it was unintentional.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, college football fans: longtime journalist who writes about the Southeastern Conference laying in the weeds, trying to catch the Public Enemy No. 1 in the South. You got it. I was in such a hurry to bury Harbaugh I waited a whole day to file this story.

Harbaugh's violation is part of the quicksand created by these camps, something the NCAA needs to address. In fact, his violation is minor compared to major issues at play:

● The cost to schools to have their football coaches jetting around to summer camps;

● The temporary abandonment of players already in a particular school's program, the better for coaches to recruit 24/7;

● Wear and tear on college football coaches who are actual human beings with actual lives outside football, and desperately need a break from what has become an increasingly elaborate and time-consuming courtship ritual, the sports equivalent of ever-escalating teenage Promposals;

● High school football players are valuable assets that lift up an entire $100 million athletic department budget, and we can see by these camps just how valuable they really are.

Satellite camps—in which small schools host football clinics for high school players, and invite coaches from larger schools to attend as instructors (and recruiters, basically, but more on that shortly)—have become an emotional issue in college football. Alabama coach Nick Saban called them "bad" for the sport. But can they be good?

In one regard, yes. On Thursday, the camp I attended brought in some money for Cedar Grove High School and Maynard Jackson High School. More than 200 kids wanted to pay $40 to see a spectacular personality like Harbaugh, and be seen by Division I coaches like Pittsburgh's Pat Narduzzi and the Georgia's Kirby Smart.

There could be a new blocking sled on the way for kids at those schools because of the money generated.

But, back to Harbaugh and the rules.

I wasn't there Thursday to do a "gotcha" story. I'm an Xs and Os guy. Go look it up. I made plans five weeks ago to attend this camp in order to get an inside look. Harbaugh has used satellite camps to cut a hole in the SEC's regional recruiting fence, and I wanted to see up close what he meant when he argued that the camps were perfectly kosher, and that they provided "opportunity" for unknown players.

So I walked around the first three hours in 90-degree heat, talking to kids and parents about why they think these camps are valuable. I wanted to get a sense if these camps are worth the cost of one coach arriving by private jet—guess who?—and another coach, Smart, by mere yellow helicopter.

There was some real teaching being done by the Michigan coach and his staff, no doubt. That was cool. Harbaugh was energized and plugged in. I can see the allure.

Now for the downside.

A big-time lineman who plays for a high school in the Atlanta area was under a water tent on the sidelines, dressed in blue jeans. He told me he was there to watch his cousin. He was not registered for the camp. I confirmed that with him.

"I said I was here to watch my cousin," he said to me a second time.

I was 10 feet away when Harbaugh strolled under the tent, looking for something to drink. It was broiling. I was there on the sideline, talking to a friend who runs a recruiting service.

It was a chance to get some good color for the story: a close Harbaugh exchange with a player, and the kid getting a lifetime memory.

The big-time lineman said he has 34 college scholarship offers. He's a prospect, but I'm not sure if Harbaugh knew him.

"Hey, warm me up," Harbaugh said as he threw his arm around the lineman's waist under the tent. It was already plenty warm. The lineman is 6-foot-5, 290 pounds. We are talking about a serious prospect.

The lineman's mom was sitting on a chair close by. Harbaugh took a picture with her.

Harbaugh's contact with the lineman was an NCAA violation. These camps are supposed to be about "instruction," not "recruiting," and a coach cannot talk to a prospect who just shows up and is not registered for the camp.

Look, I didn't make the rules.

It's pretty silly, really, that it's illegal for a coach to mucking it up with a player. During these camps, coaches aren't even allowed to say to a recruit, "We would love to see you at Michigan." Harbaugh didn't say that, but I'm just telling you the narrow boundary.

I waited until after the camp when Harbaugh was off the field and walking into the high school alone to talk to him.

I'm sorry, Jim, I said to him. You committed a violation. He chugged a whole bottle of water as he walked. He crumpled the empty bottle in his hand.

"I don't trust what you're saying," Harbaugh said to me. He walked away. I didn't have a chance to ask him about the hazards of recruiting.

Nathan Wood, the assistant athletic director for compliance at Michigan, was on the sidelines at the camp.

"Once evidence of a potential violation is presented, we'll fish it out," Wood told me when I asked about Harbaugh's contact with the lineman. "We will research and investigate these things and then submit a report to the NCAA."

You know what an SEC player personnel guy told me when I asked, generically, without using names, if what I saw with Harbaugh and the lineman was a violation?

"Yes," he said. He didn't seem to get any satisfaction out of saying that. Of the rule that was broken and the general rules around the camps he said, "It's a nightmare."

The lineman was interviewed by others and asked, "What did Coach Harbaugh have to say to you?"

Those interviews will be out there shortly, if not already, and a SEC coach or a Big Ten rival will see it and go, "Whoops." The lineman is standing there in blue jeans and these sleuths can add.

Harbaugh's contact with a player not registered for the camp was an illegal "bump"—or impermissible contact—and silly in the grand scheme of kids getting an education. But it points out the absurdity of some rules, and how they need to be changed, or else these camps need to be eliminated.

College football can be an acrimonious business of adders and subtractors. Just ask Bo Davis, the former Alabama assistant coach, who lost his job because he violated the "bump" rule. Somebody reported it.

Nick Saban has warned of "unintended consequences" of these camps and the involvement of third parties in college football recruiting with these camps. Saban basically said, "shit can happen."

After the camp Thursday, Harbaugh said Saban was being a hypocrite for complaining about the satellite camps and the rule-breaking dangers when Saban's own school was just busted for breaking rules.

So there I was, right in the middle of this feud. I'm not calling Harbaugh a hypocrite.

There is a bigger story going on.

The SEC opposes the camps and is leading a push to get them banned next year. The SEC claims its opposition is based on academics and that kids should be recruited on campus where classes are held.

Easy for the SEC to say. It has many more good players in its backyard within driving distance of the classroom than the Big Ten, which wants to expand its recruiting reach to the south, and I don't blame the Big Ten for trying to increase its footprint. The drain of jobs in the Midwest over the last 20 years has eroded its high school football talent base.

But these satellite camps have added another layer to recruiting that the college game does not need. Budgets are growing so coaches can have money to attend these road-show camps. The SEC, for its part, has gone on the offensive with recruiting spending. College football coaches are losing the vacation time off they need to reload from the stress of the job.

These issues are way bigger than Saban vs. Harbaugh. The major conferences need to compromise for the sake of, well, everybody.

I was at the Atlanta camp to ask the high school players if these camps really were the land of opportunity, as Harbaugh and Washington State's Mike Leach, among others, insist. There were college coaches from about 10 schools on hand from the start, and more coaches, like Georgia Tech's Ted Roof, trickled in.

There were players at the camp who are not going to play college football. They were there because it cost just $40 and they love the sport. One mom told me as she watched through the fence, "He's here for something to do. It's affordable."

There were many more players there who have offers to small schools and were trying to improve their stock. I talked to 10 different kids about that. I talked to a man from north Georgia who brought high school underclassmen down to the camp, and those kids had offers from less-prominent programs.

AJ Terrell of Westlake, Georgia, one of the top rising 2017 players in the country, pointed to his friend and teammate Tre Person, a rising senior at Westlake High School—Cam Newton's alma mater—and summed it up for me.

"They know him, but they don't know him." He was talking about the coaches from the big schools. They know Tre as a player, but do not know his heart and competitiveness.

Person is six feet tall, 150 pounds, a defensive back. He has offers from South Carolina State, Tulane, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Mercer, and Troy. He has bigger ambitions.

"I play bigger than my size," he said. "I want the big schools to see that. I'm real physical and real aggressive."

I'm sure there were players there Thursday who feel overlooked and felt this camp was their opportunity. But it might have not been the best setting to explore the argument that an "unknown"—somebody desperate for a scholarship with the undiscovered talent to match—was using this camp to get on the radar. Atlanta is a major metropolitan area and recruiting hotbed, and most of the prospects here have been sorted through.

The unknowns might be at a camp at a more rural location, and to really sort things out, I'll have to go to one of those. Because I have a feeling that college coaches had film of many of these kids I saw on Thursday. I don't know that they were the desperate kids Harbaugh says he is trying to help find scholarships.

I do know Michigan offered a scholarship to a player from south Florida that it saw at a satellite camp and then Harbaugh pulled back the offer, which happens all the time to high school recruits.

These camps are another escalation in college football's ongoing arms race. Seen through the lens of the way things are done in the sport, SEC coaches see Harbaugh as basically trespassing—and wearing a neon suit while doing it. He has slipped inside the SEC's perimeter wire, and is threatening its recruiting fertile plain.

This is no accident. Harbaugh decided he was going to have summer camps featuring Michigan coaches and colors from here to Australia. The Detroit Free Press reported Michigan spent $211,948 on its Summer Swarm satellite camps in 2015.

An SEC coach told me his school was budgeting $250,000 for summer satellite camps.

An SEC athletic director told me his budget was going to grow and he was not happy.

Michigan had seven coaches here today. Georgia's Smart, trying to play defense, arrived in the yellow helicopter and landed on the baseball field. The camp was supposed to start at 10 a.m.

Harbaugh didn't wait for Coach Smart. The Michigan coach started the camp at 9:45 a.m. It was a spectacle, because the Michigan coach brought to the camp the only two Atlantans who could share a stage with Dr. Martin Luther King: former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and Major League Baseball home run hero Hank Aaron.

Harbaugh wore an Aaron jersey. Young spoke to the players. Aaron spoke to the players. There were more than 200 ambitious kids on one knee paying attention. Hell, it was electric for me.

When the NCAA relented and said college coaches could travel more than 50 miles from their campus to hold these satellite camps, Arkansas coach Bret Bielema said it was going to be "the wild, wild west."

The SEC is unleashing a torrent of recruiting for these satellite camps and budgets are swelling.

Bielema said the Razorbacks are going to take their camps "global." I don't know if that means Paris, or Tijuana. I do know the SEC football programs have no restraint once a door is opened. The recruiting game just amped up, and no one does recruiting like the SEC.

Bielema said Arkansas has had 84 inquiries about its staff leaving campus to instruct players at a satellite camp. He said his program has a "special fund." Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a former Razorbacks player, said Arkansas could hold a camp in his stadium.

Other SEC schools are on the jetway with their planes. Florida coach Jim McElwain just said, "We'll be out there."

SEC schools have player personnel staffs that wouldn't fit inside some NFL offices. The conference is going to Harbaugh-proof its turf by pilling resources atop resources. More clinics, more helicopters, more money, and more time.

Even in a major college football universe where revenues keep going up and up and up, that last resource remains finite. There are only 24 hours in everyone's day, even Harbaugh's.

In opposing the satellite camps, the SEC might have been trying to save the SEC … from itself. Because the conference—which sponsors fewer sports than the Big Ten schools, and devotes more money to football—just got an excuse from Harbaugh to pour even more money into recruiting.

Is this what anyone really wants? Will it do any actual good?

There was no way, I thought, that a rules violation would be committed Thursday. The spotlight was too big. But then I saw a compliance officer from the University of Georgia sitting on a bench. I started to think about it again.

I had read about the rules on these camps five weeks ago, and part of my story was going to be the landmines, the "unintended consequences."

Would Georgia fans, or Alabama fans, be the eyes of their program and look for Harbaugh missteps? It happens, but when I looked at the large crowd of Michigan fans on Thursday and the number of player personnel staff in maize and blue, I thought UGa would be the one turned in for some arcane rules violation.

I didn't think rules were going to be this much of the story.

College football fans can be a wonderfully passionate and paranoid bunch, so here's some full disclosure: I am going to start work soon on a book for Macmillan: St. Martin's Press about the 50-year old analytics behind the University of Alabama football recruiting process and how the program sorts through high school players. The book will involve people who know how the process works, how it has been modified over the years, and how it has led to four national titles in seven seasons.

Michigan fans could claim a conspiracy—that somehow, some way, Saban sent me to Maynard Jackson High School to dig up dirt on Harbaugh, and conspired with VICE Sports to do so. (Editor's note: Nope). Only if this story was about Jim Harbaugh committing a rule violation, it would have posted immediately, and been trumpeted as such on social media, and the resulting gotcha shitstorm already would be fully underway.

Instead, I'm left with more questions than answers. What was Harbaugh supposed to do when the big-time lineman stuck out his hand? What was the Michigan coach supposed to do when the lineman asked the coach to pose for a picture with his mother? Was any of that, you know, wrong?

Michigan might have done a de-briefing about Thursday; it might eventually just self-reported this violation. Schools do that all the time. What good does that serve?

Should the rules be changed to be stringent about these "bumps"? Yes, if the camps continue. The NCAA needs to modify the rules, or get rid of the camps entirely.

Anyway, I'm not worried about Harbaugh. I'm more worried about Cedar Grove High School coach Jimmy Smith, who put on the camp and made some money for his program and the program at Maynard Jackson High School.

Jimmy might be buying new equipment with the measly $10,000 or so made off this camp. His school in DeKalb County is like a lot of schools here who have seen their budgets shrink. If college recruiting budgets ramp up, perhaps a few dollars will trickle down. Perhaps that would be good.

I still don't know if satellite camps are worth the expense and fuss. The NCAA and the conferences have to do real research. If schools are sincere about wanting to calm recruiting and save money—and not just acting like those things matter to gloss over being upset about aggressive, creative coaches like Harbaugh—then a better solution would be to allow players to make summer visits. Also, the national signing date should be moved up to the fall.

In the meantime, it is very hard for me to complain about these camps—not when I saw so much delight on the faces of the kids working with Harbaugh and his staff. Amid the artifice and hypocrisy that often accompanies college football, their smiles were genuine.

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