SEC's Greg Sankey wants NCAA to relax tampering rules

College conference commissioners are requesting the NCAA rewrite the tampering rule, but only recently. They're compelled to protect their conference. However, the rules are not confusing. 

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey is the latest to claim tampering rules are outdated. According to ESPN, “we need clarity” and the “tampering rules are archaic” were the common themes when asked about the new landscape in college athletics.

Both are rather intriguing word choices. The tampering rules, as outlined by the NCAA, were introduced within the last decade. Far from the meaning of ‘archaic.'

“We need clarity” is also curious. Why does the NCAA need to provide clarity? The rules include more verbiage than is necessary. However, the rule can be whittled down to one basic concept that should not need any further clarification.

If a player is enrolled at one program, they cannot be contacted by an outside program. 

The rules are not the problem

Interested parties rarely seem to be worried about tampering at all. ESPN previously reported "multiple officials claim "it's essentially a competitive disadvantage to not tamper." The tampering rule simply prevents activities that complicate the NIL era. 

The introduction of NIL and the ability to pay players without a cap on spending, player contracts or recruiting restrictions, NIL turned college player acquisition into the wild west. The goal is as simple as it has ever been. He who gets the best players has the best chance to win.

The rules are not representative of the NIL era. In time, they likely will evolve to reflect those changes, but that would not alter the idea that a student-athlete enrolled at one program should not be contacted by an outside program. 

Since Dabo Swinney’s “tampering allegations” press conference, the NCAA took tampering allegations seriously. Including a memo from the office of NCAA enforcement informing programs that they have instructed their agents to look for evidence of tampering and levy harsh punishments.

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Only after that memo did we start hearing people or programs having an issue with how the rules are written.

Rewriting rules should create more restrictions, not less

The issue is the rules should not get less strict. They should be stricter. The assumption is if the rules reflected the NIL dynamic, these teams would have less guardrails. When the idea should be quite the opposite.

Sankey referenced the memo sent out by the NCAA and suggested the memo changed the policy. The NCAA responded to the Big Ten's request and similar statement confirming the memo didn’t change anything. It simply reinforced their stance on the rules as previously established.

College football specifically has several issues to address. Some of them have been mentioned here, but there’s also the schedule. Yet Commissioners and conferences are not talking about those issues.

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The NCAA should consider rules changes or rule rewrites, but the tampering rule would be dramatically low on that priority list. The only real question for those asking for rules changes would be, do you really want the NCAA to rewrite the rules to adapt to the NIL era? 

That’s a floodgate not everyone should not want opened unless they are prepared for what the new world order of college football would look like. If they actually rewrote the rules to reflect the NIL era, there would likely be more restrictions, not less. 

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