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Will Muschamp offers up his take on why basketball recruiting faces more potential corruption than football
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During his Tuesday media availability in Columbia, Will Muschamp was asked about the FBI’s investigation into the current state of corruption in college basketball.
Is South Carolina’s coach concerned that the same level of corruption is happening in his sport? Or that the apparel companies are potentially offering handouts similar to the ones allegedly being given out to young basketball prospects?
The Gamecock coach offered up his theory on why college basketball opens itself up to more potential corruption — Muschamp believes it mostly has to do with the finite amount of prospects schools are pursuing.
“Well, I think basketball recruiting is much more specific to numbers… Let’s just say for the 2019 class, you could say that we are going to have 300 recruitable players — what we would define as recruitable: we’ve made a phone call, we’ve had an off-campus evaluation, we’ve had an on-campus contact,” Muschamp said. “That’s a recruitable player. Those are kinda the parameters. Where in basketball, and I don’t know the number — I don’t recruit for basketball, but I would say 15-20 for three slots maybe. 25 at the most.
Muschamp also noted that most young football prospects aren’t viewed as commodities by the apparel companies like they are in basketball.
“Our sports are different in the fact that our apparel companies aren’t targetting our guys at this point — that I know of, and (in) high school,” he continued. “That’s where it becomes a much different between the two sports — just from my knowledge. So I think that’s a huge difference and I think the numbers of targets certainly change the landscape a little bit as far as the things that have been doing on.”
With so few elite players and so much money available for those players to grab, Muschamp makes some good points. Investing in a star high school quarterback is likely to provide little return on investment for apparel companies, and even they if chosen wisely, they would have to wait several years for a return on their investment. While in basketball, it’s much easier to determine which prospects are elite at an early age and the timetable for a potential return is minimal.
A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Michael Wayne Bratton oversees the news coverage for Saturday Down South. Michael previously worked for FOX Sports and NFL.com
