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Camp ban proponents such as Hugh Freeze are seeing the flaws

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Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze is having a bit of buyers remorse regarding his stance on satellite camps.

Freeze had been one of the more outspoken proponents of last Friday’s NCAA’s Division I Council measure, which banned satellite camps for FBS coaches, effective immediately.

The SEC and ACC pushed hard for the rule because they felt other programs and coaches — notably, Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh — were infringing on their recruiting territory.

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Freeze was one of the coaches that thought the time off from hoping from camp to camp would be good.

“I’m selfish with my time,” Freeze told the Clarion-Ledger of the camps. “I’m away from my family enough, and I just did not want to go. I was ready to. We would’ve jumped in with the rest of them and gone to work. But I’m glad we can have a camp and I can sleep at home.”

However, the side effects of the new rule are starting to hit home for Freeze and perhaps some other coaches, who thought the ban was a good idea five days ago.

Set aside the fact that it’s now going to cost recruits more money to travel to more camps and be seen by multiple coaches; Freeze doesn’t really care about that. But what he does care about is the fact that Group of Five coaches won’t be able to work Ole Miss camps anymore, which was a huge benefit for both Power Five and Group of Five programs in the past.

As detailed by Sports Illustrated’ Andy Staples, Ole Miss camps were attended by various levels of players and the Rebels were only recruiting a handful. That allowed opportunities for coaches from Group of Five programs who happened to be working the camp to see and speak to talent with whom they might not have otherwise have had contact.

Oh.

“I would love to continue that,” Freeze said Monday of the Power Five and Group of Five partnership. “I just don’t want satellite camps for the Power Five. I am for non-Power Five schools being able to attend and evaluate.”

This is yet another unintended consequence of a rule that was driven by politics rather than common sense. The SEC and ACC had an agenda and for some reason, the Pac-12, Big 12, Mountain West and Sun Belt sided with those conferences even though it wasn’t in their best interest to do so.

And now the trickle-down effect begins.

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Staples intimated that one way for Group of Five assistants to lift their portion of the ban would be to file an antitrust suit against the NCAA and all the leagues that voted for the ban.

Because lower-level coaches are paid to work the camps, they could claim these entities colluded to take away an opportunity for them to earn money that the entities would have paid to them without the ban.

Let’s all hope it doesn’t come to this. But it’s clear the satellite camp ban wasn’t a well thought out idea and it’s only taken a few days for some of the ban’s strongest proponents to see the flaw in their idea.

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Graham Watson is the editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at dr.saturday@ymail.com or follow her on Twitter!

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