Irving, Texas – UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero made an apparent mistake by voting the wrong way about satellite camps on behalf of the Pac-12, league commissioner Larry Scott said Wednesday. Eleven of the 12 schools in the conference were in favor of keeping satellite camps, but Guerrero voted to eliminate them.
Scott didn’t exactly confirm that UCLA was the only school in the league to vote against the camps, but said, “Draw your own conclusions”.
Four of the five conferences (all except for the Big Ten) and six of the 10 FBS leagues passed a measure on April 8 banning work at summer camps outside of football coaches’ own practice facilities. Both the ACC and SEC proposed that prohibition.
“I think he’s clear he did not vote the way he was supposed to vote,” Scott told reporters, according to ESPN. “We had 11 schools in our conference that wanted this looked at as we studied more comprehensively football recruiting issues — there’s a variety of them — but in the meantime, we’d prefer the status quo, which for us allows coaches to attend other camps in other markets.”
Scott said Guerrero was required to abide by a “directed vote” that echoed the consensus reached by its members. He has spoken with Guerrero but said it remained unclear how the UCLA athletic director had voted the wrong way. Scott finally commented he didn’t think anything like that had happened before.
The NCAA Board of Directors is set to vote whether to confirm the ban on April 28. Given that apparently one conference voted the wrong way, it seems likely they will either table the rule or return it to the drawing board.
Texas Tech AD Kirby Hocutt, whose conference, the Big 12, usually hosts camps across Texas, voted for the ban. The legislation would have still allowed coaches conduct or work on satellite camps within one’s own state.
The satellite camp debate seems to be endless
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, whose conference is thought to have led the charge against satellite camps, reacted to critics of the ban on Wednesday. He told reporters that the “name-calling and finger-pointing” was not good for the legislative process.
Sankey rejected the idea that the SEC insisted on a ban to protect its own interests, including its geographic recruiting turf from coaches such as Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh. In contrast, he believes the NCAA wanted to push back against satellite caps as an attempt to avoid football recruiting to “go the way of basketball recruiting, where summer camps take on more importance than the scholastic environment.
Source: Fox News