If Ivy League executive director Jeff Orleans is your 75-year-old grandmother, Penn football coach Al Bagnoli is a 16-year-old girl.
That's right, coach, a 16-year-old girl. And it's not just because of the tanning.
As reported in last Friday's Daily Pennsylvanian, the two stand on opposite sides of the text messaging debate when it comes to recruiting.
Orleans and the Ivy League have submitted a proposal to ban NCAA coaches from text messaging recruits, while Bagnoli thinks u should text ne1 u want 2.
"It's 24-hour access to a recruit," Bagnoli said. "Everybody [text messages recruits]. It's very common."
What's very common, then, is coaches being able to find loopholes in the NCAA's measures of curbing phone calls to recruits. With the invention of text messaging, coaches can initiate contact without wasting one of their precious phone calls, which the NCAA has limited.
With new technology must come new restrictions. It's actually a very similar issue to one that professional sports are having such a difficult time handling.
The telephone call is like the anabolic steroid. The NCAA realized that it could be an issue, so they acted to curb telephone contact.
But just like with designer steroids and HGH, there will always be new avenues to beat the system - in this case, the text message. And the rule books must play catch-up.
Why, though? Why can't we just let a loophole be a loophole? After all, every coach from Southern Cal to Southern Vermont knows how to send a message (with the possible exception of Joe Paterno, who'd be lucky if he could get his remote control to work).
Why? Ask Penn hoops freshman Justin Reilly. Better yet, ask his $700 monthly phone bill.
A small part of the process of getting recruited shouldn't set somebody back anything that close to the monthly payment on a BMW 750i.
Especially in a sport like basketball, in which many sought-after recruits have so little in the way of money, footing the bill can be very costly.
If I were a recruit, I'd be a little miffed about spending $700 no matter how much coach K thinks about me when he goes to bed at night. I also don't need him to tell me how well I played in my AAU game. My 40 points and 15 boards gave me a pretty good idea of that; besides I'm never going to get that dime back from Verizon.
I've had a cell phone for almost two years now and have been receiving text messages for the better part of that time. I'll never forget the first time my mother opened the family phone bill, saw a text message charge and said, "I thought only girls did that."
Apparently girls and college coaches, and the latter needs to stop.
The only exception to this should be if women's basketball coach Patrick Knapp needs to send his whole recruiting speech via text message because he lost his voice by the first media time-out.
Otherwise - and I can't believe I'm saying this about something in athletics - the Ivy League has this one right. A ban on text messaging will do nothing to the competitiveness in college sports. And if none of your competitors have it, do we really need the "24-hour access to a recruit" Bagnoli described?
No, save the kid the dime or the 7,000 dimes, and do it the old fashioned way.
Post on his Facebook.com wall.
Or do it the Joe Paterno way, God forbid, and show up at his house.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
