What Good is a Verbal Commitment?

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When a kid makes a verbal commitment to a school, it is an oral agreement between the player and the school that the player ceases looking at other schools and the school adjusts its recruiting around that player.  This is genuinely in the best interests of both parties if a verbal commitment can be upheld on both sides.  At that point, other coaches should cease recruiting the said player out of courtesy.  This is traditionally how the system has worked, and it's worked fairly well over the years.

 

 

For those of you who hold the Mike DeCourcy/O.J. Mayo view that a verbal commitment means little in reality, there's probably little I can do to convince you that it's a good thing to have a code of accepted ethics and, like Izzo and Wainwright, to call out violators.  The word "commitment" by definition implies pledging and binding.  A loose analogy here might be promising to marry someone; would you really want other parties going after your fiance? 

 

 

You don't commit to such a thing until you're beyond-all-doubts certain, and unless you're doing it for the right reasons - and you rescind the commitment if you want to look elsewhere.  Ultimately it shouldn't matter whether a promise is legally bound or oral.  Perhaps I'm yearning too much for an ideal that just doesn't mesh with reality; but if you can't understand the concept of commitment, there probably isn't much hope for you in the long run, anyway.

 

 

The grand point here is that Mayo and Gordon never should have verbally commited in the first place because they were not 100% positive, or they commited for the wrong reasons (Gordon's father told a newspaper that he was tired of the phone calls).  Perhaps the NCAA needs to do away with verbals and move to a system similar to the "early decision" option for college undergraduate applicants (where you're contracturally bound to attend for a given length of time if you signal that a school is your first choice).  The bottom line however is that the NCAA needs to step in and do something.  Verbal commitments either need to mean something like they always have or they should go away, because having them be ambiguous only fuels the fire of rabid "experts" and creates a bad situation for both colleges and players.  As it is now, there is greater bitterness between Indiana and Illinois simply because of the "insider"-fueled Gordon fiasco, and it could have been entirely prevented. 

 

 

It's rare for me to call on the NCAA to do anything, but this type of situation calls for immediate action on the league's behalf.  I don't exactly know how, but this is a mess that could potentially become worse in future cases.  Until then, all we can do is laud coaches like Izzo, scorn ones like Sampson, and try to convince those whose heartbeat hinges on every fragment of news in the college basketball recruiting world to take it easy.

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