Column: Father the culprit in odd USC football situation

When you were 13 and in seventh grade, what was on your mind? You were probably thinking about your next homework assignment, or, more likely, how to talk to your middle school crush. You most certainly were not thinking about where you were going to college. That is, unless you are David Sills.

In case you haven’t heard, David Sills is a 13-year-old, seventh-grade football “star” who has just been offered a scholarship to the University of Southern California by its new head coach, Lane Kiffin. If you look more closely at the articles on the topic, though, it becomes apparent that this is yet another case of poor parenting. Sills’ father is the one who made all the decisions and called Kiffin to accept the offer, and it is clear that he is pushing his son into an irresponsible decision. At the risk of sounding like an old man, I wonder why parents can’t let their kids simply be kids any more. Why can’t Sills live a normal life in high school? Now he will be followed by the media and hounded throughout his high-school career.

More importantly, though, of all schools, why the hell did Sills’ father pick Kiffin and USC? Talk about a poor parenting decision — Lane Kiffin is one of the biggest jokes in college. In just one year, he has become a bigger weasel coach than Nick Saban and Urban Meyer combined — not an easy task — by skipping out on Tennessee after a single season. At least Saban and Meyer gave their schools three years of service.

Kiffin has a 12-21 record as a head coach in the NFL and the NCAA and has become known more for his blustery speeches than for his actual coaching abilities. At a February 2009 breakfast, he accused Florida head coach Urban Meyer of recruiting violations. Ironically, Kiffin himself committed five secondary recruiting violations himself during the spring. It’s not a good sign when your most famous moment was an infamous press conference in which Al Davis, a living zombie, fires you and calls you a “flat-out liar.”

Given his past performance, the odds of Kiffin making it until 2018 as the Trojans’ head coach are slim. Either USC will wise up and realize that Kiffin is nowhere near qualified to be a head coach or he will find an even cushier job to usurp. Barring something miraculous, I can’t imagine Kiffin’s tenure at USC ending any better than Charlie Weis’ tenure at Notre Dame.

Leaving the stupidity of Sills’ father’s decision behind, there is still the question of why Kiffin would offer a scholarship to such a young recruit. How good could he possibly be? What if something happens to him during high school? What if his current talent simply doesn’t translate to the high school level, let alone the college level? The answer lies in the fact that there is simply no reason for Kiffin not to do this.

First of all, verbal commitments, like the one Sills and his father have given, mean absolutely nothing to the NCAA. Either side can renege on a verbal commitment, including the school that offered it. The only item that is binding for both parties is the national letter of intent signed by a player in his senior year of high school, which obliges a player to attend a certain university on scholarship to play football. This is why we see the yearly dance of players decommitting and committing to colleges — a verbal commitment is not a contract.

Thus, there are no disadvantages for Lane Kiffin. He offers the verbal commitment, and if Sills turns out to be a high school superstar, he already has an inside route to USC. If, as is also likely, Sills peters out, Kiffin does not have to offer him the scholarship. Sills can also choose to change institutions if he wishes, as a verbal commitment is non-binding. There are no reasons for Kiffin, or any other coach, to not recruit middle-school athletes. While coaches are technically barred from calling young athletes like Sills, they can, as Kiffin did with Sills’ father, simply ask the athletes themselves (or their parents) to call them, avoiding the NCAA restrictions.

You can bet that plenty of college football coaches asked themselves why they didn’t think of this before. Recruiting middle schoolers is already considered commonplace in college basketball, and with the increasingly cutthroat nature of college football today, coaches will do anything to keep up. While the NCAA can attempt to ban this, I’m not sure it can do anything to stop this phenomenon. There is simply no way for the NCAA to prevent coaches from talking to young athletes and, especially, to their parents. It’s just a shame that kids can’t be kids anymore.