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Athletes got paper to sign in 1960s
By
Kyle Nagel
Dayton Daily News
Already chairman of the Athletic Council at Texas Tech University for a decade and head of the school's political science department for even longer, J. William Davis was considered one of the bright minds in college athletics administration by the late 1950s.
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<!-- inset --> <!--begintext--> Around that time, the Texas-based Southwest Athletic Conference was working to strengthen its relationship with the Texas Interscholastic League, the state's high school athletics overseer, particularly in recruiting. With a bevy of football talent in the state, conference members that included Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and others frequently sought the same high school players.
Howard Grubbs, the conference's commissioner, came to Davis for help. By 1964, after years of denials and rewrites, the government professor created what is now called the National Letter of Intent, a contract between recruits and colleges that provides athletic scholarship aid for the promise of attending that school for at least one academic year.
The NLI is widely considered one of the most important innovations in college athletics in the past half century, as it provides clarity for both recruit and university. It will take the national spotlight today, the first day football recruits may sign these promises to wear a particular jersey and end the incessant phone calls and letters from other coaches.
"Kids used to be recruited right until they showed up on campus," said Thomas Yeager, commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association and a member of the five-person NLI steering committee, which is charged with hearing appeals cases in NLI disputes. "When they sign that letter, there's a protection as well as a responsibility."
The NLI program, which began with seven conferences and eight independent schools
and has grown to include 55 conferences and more than 500 members, oversees all sports. But football gains the most attention on the first available day to sign the NLI, dubbed Signing Day.
Players often hold press conferences, usually in the school's gym or cafeteria. They sit at a table with their parents or guardians (who must also sign the letter, along with the university's athletics director) in front of the media or fellow students. The letter is often faxed from the high school to the university, where coaches sometimes wait in anticipation to discover if their charms outdid others.
From there, the NLI goes to the conference office. Each Division I conference, aside from the Ivy League, which does not award athletic scholarships, uses the NLI.
Once the letter is filed and the player is both accepted into school and determined eligible by the NCAA's Initial Eligibility Clearinghouse, he or she must spend one academic year at the school. The penalty for breaking an NLI is ineligibility for one season and the loss of one year of eligibility.
However, like with any contract, there are disputes. Say a coach resigns. Or a player gets homesick. Or the roommate is a pain.
Athletes have to right to appeal to be released from their commitment, which happens somewhere between 20 and 30 times per year, said Torie Johnson, director of the National Letter of Intent Program.
"As you might imagine," Johnson said, "there are plenty of reasons the kids want to leave school."
Yeager and his committee brethren have heard them all.
"Sometimes there are hazing situations," he said. "Sometimes you have a rural kid from the country who comes to a city school, gets in the wrong neighborhood one night and gets scared. You have kids look around and say, 'Man, this isn't what I bought into. My girlfriend dumped me. My coach is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've gotta get out.' "
For the National Letter, though, it took plenty of time just to get in. After Davis was dispatched to clean up the relationship between the SWC and the Texas Interscholastic League, he submitted the idea for a binding contract in recruiting, but he didn't fund much support.
In 1961, he proposed the idea at the NCAA convention. It was defeated handily.
The next year, it drew more interest, but was again defeated. So that summer, in 1962, Davis met in Colorado Springs with a faculty member from each conference and determined the conferences would be interested if he tweaked the idea.
Davis, Grubbs and Big Ten Conference Commissioner Bill Reed met in Chicago to finalize the letter. At first it was one page, front and back, with one signing day each year for all sports (May 20). There was little flexibility.
Since its inception, the NLI program has been administered by the Collegiate Commissioners Association, which was formed in 1939 to promote uniformity in football officiating. By the early 1990s, the CCA determined that the language and scope of the letter were too narrow. It turned to the Pacific 10 Conference for help.
"At that time, the theory was that you shouldn't have any rules that go on for more than one page," said David Price, a Pac-10 associate commissioner at the time who now is the NCAA's vice president of enforcement services. "So, you had the letter on the front and back of one page and a sheet of interpretations."
Price worked to expand the NLI to its current four-page format. He de-legalized the language and increased the amount of information.
Not without a few drafts, though.
"Hopefully I burned all of those," Price said.
In the meantime, not much has changed for the most important athletics document a high school senior will sign. And, according to athletics administrators, the significance of the letter cannot be overstated.
All because a government professor wanted to ease the strain for high school football players in Texas.
"Like most things," Yeager said, "no one knew how much it would grow."
Contact Kyle Nagel at (937) 225-7389.
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