Weekly Word: The new recruiting landscape, quarterbacks and more

Just days after NCAA president Mark Emmert awarded the Kansas City Jayhawks the national championship trophy, which I can only assume his organization wasn't so bold as to bug, college coaches go back on the road this weekend for an April evaluation period, amidst a very different recruiting climate.

I tend to not have a whole lot of sympathy for college coaches when their jobs get hard, because jobs that pay as much money as theirs do should be hard sometimes, but these coaches out there recruiting this weekend, they're seeing one of their luxuries erode.

That luxury?

The ability to plan.

Used to be where if you had a sophomore-to-be point guard right now and a freshman point guard coming in the summer, you could look at the position with a little less scrutiny in recruiting, focus on other areas, because something would have to happen for you to need one. Now, you have no idea. Something happened the moment the transfer exemption passed.

It's gonna make things harder, or simpler if you're a go-with-the-flow sort and not much into the whole organization thing.

Either way, it's weird.

Coaches are going to be wise to recruit all players, all positions, at all times, with equal gusto. And with this transfer specter hanging out there, coaches might also be wise to keep recruiting players once they've committed elsewhere, which isn't normally as prevalent in basketball as football.

When a player transfers, and there's no telling what percentage of the Class of 2023, for example, will, schools or coaches with an established relationship might have advantages.

Once a player signs, calling that player is tampering. Before he signs (but after he's committed elsewhere), it's just recruiting. And it doesn't matter anyway, because there's a million ways to tamper with someone else's player without technically tampering with someone else's player.

Just what the NCAA needed to do, make college basketball recruiting even more under-handed.