Recruiting costs for football rising

For three years at Louisiana Tech University, Derek Dooley, multitasking as the school’s football coach and athletic director, had conflicted interests when it came to dumping valuable funds into recruiting services.

On one hand, Dooley, like most Division I coaches who view winning as a necessity to maintaining employment, craved the latest technology that could help his staff locate diamond-in-the-rough players from all parts of the country. On the other hand, he had a cash-strapped budget to balance.

So, he settled for bootleg copies.

“I used to call the big schools and get somebody on the inside to make copies of it and shoot it to me,” Dooley said last week during the SEC’s spring meetings in Destin, Fla.

“When you’re low-budget survival, that’s what you did, man.”

Even though the budget is now seemingly unlimited for Dooley as football coach at the University of Tennessee, his small-school mentality hasn’t totally disappeared.

“We’re not trying to be cheap, but also there’s a little bit of fiscal responsibility in not being grossly excessive,” Dooley said. “It’s easy in these kinds of programs because you’ve got so many people and plenty of money not to have that oversight. That’s where excess can happen.

“There’s obviously no abuse and we’re getting good return on investment. I think every year we need to revisit it, and that’s what we’ve done.”

An analysis of the recruiting services UT has hired since 2008, provided to the News Sentinel and other media outlets through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that Dooley and his staff are enjoying the perks that a program with deeper pockets provides, but they are also closely monitoring where that money is going, and how much is being devoted to certain providers.

In 2008, Phillip Fulmer’s last season with the Vols, the football program spent $47,497 on 12 recruiting services. In 2010, Dooley’s first season, UT devoted $55,000 alone to XOS Digital, which provides the Vols with a deep library of Web-enabled videos of high school prospects from around the country.

When Lane Kiffin took over for Fulmer in 2009, the budget for recruiting services more than tripled. The Vols went from subscribing to 11 services at an average price of $4,317 to 17 services at an average of more than $8,600 — for a grand total of $146,489.

That cost increased by more than $31,000 in 2010 when Dooley took over and raised the budget to $177,697. Though they hired the same number of services as Kiffin and his assistants, Dooley and his staff certainly put their own touch on the group, dropping six of the companies from 2009 — one of which, Video for Athletes, made up for more than 17 percent of Kiffin’s budget — and replacing them with six new firms, including XOS Digital.

Inflation and the increased demand for these services likely played a role in the higher tab for 2010. Eight of the 11 companies UT hired for both years charged more in 2010. Only one — Wade Rollinson — dropped in price.

So far in 2011, the Vols have spent $19,074 on recruiting services.

“The services provide great value in video,” Dooley said. “I think it’s a good, healthy market of business. And it helps all the schools.

“I think the recruiting service, to us, has always been a starting point or a supplement. It’s never been the end-all.”

Despite Fulmer’s relatively thrifty final year, UT has spent $390,757 on recruiting services since 2008. It’s a figure that barely represents a significant portion of the football budget, but is one that tops what some of its SEC counterparts have compiled in the same time span.

According to a report in the Birmingham News, the University of Alabama spent $218,628 and Auburn University paid $99,082 on recruiting services 2008-2010. 2007-2009, LSU spent slightly more than $250,000, according to WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge. The University of Georgia, according to a report in the Macon Telegraph, has paid just $37,619 since 2009.

The perceived dearth of high school talent in the state of Tennessee has always played a part in the Vols’ need to recruit nationally. And that certainly carries over into how much the program devotes to these kinds of scouting services, Dooley said.

Since 2008, 79 percent of UT’s signees have hailed from outside Tennessee.

“We border eight states,” Dooley said. “You’re pulling from the South, the Northeast, the Midwest, West Coast, Southwest. … With us, we do need more. We can’t rely on our state. Georgia doesn’t have to go outside of their state. They do, but they don’t have to.

“You don’t get a recruiting advantage by subscribing to a video service. And if you do, that service shouldn’t be doing business.”

In light of recent accusations that some of these services are doing more than just providing names and film, the NCAA has recently increased its scrutiny.

According to its “Bylaw Blog,” the NCAA in April moved to ban schools from subscribing to services such as Rivals.com, Scout.com and 247sports.com because the “videos of prospects in non-scholastic competition” are not free and available to the general public.

The decision was made less than a month after ESPN.com reported that the NCAA was probing the University of Oregon about the role Willie Lyles of Complete Scouting Services played in highly touted prospect Lache Seastrunk’s signing with the Ducks. Oregon, according to records obtained by ESPN.com, paid $25,000 to Lyles for his service.

Neither Fulmer, Kiffin nor Dooley has ever subscribed to Lyles’ service. The message sent by the story, though, didn’t go ignored.

“It’s no different than all the third-party stuff that everybody is worried about, and they should be,” Dooley said. “These are tough issues. I’ve always felt like when recruiting gets outside the purview of the high school coach and the family, it gets a little edgy.”

Andrew Gribble may be reached at 865-342-6327. Follow him at http://twitter.com/Andrew_Gribble and http://blogs.knoxnews.com/gribble.