There are people who have heartburn over Georgia State hosting a camp and inviting Penn State to the camp.

I will admit, my school does this with Division II and III schools so I happen to like it. Yet this little dust-up really comes from the mess that the NCAA is.

Schools used to go to good recruiting areas and host camps and schools in those fertile recruiting areas didn't like the competition.

So in comes the partner concept. It's been around for a long time and it actually has a healthy component to it. Normally a lower division school puts on the camp. The school gets the money or the lions share and it is a valuable revenue source for smaller schools and having FBS coaches there improves the marketability of the camps. They make more money and a group of kids who don't want to play Division II or III end up coming out. The kid may not be nearly as good as he thinks he is, and he doesn't draw FBS attention or even FCS, but maybe he is good enough to play for the Division II school or the Division III school (and fits their academic profile) and suddenly they have an offer from a school that might not have been able to really scout them. The kid goes from ending his playing in high school to getting partial aid in Division II or steered into appropriate scholarships and aid to play Division III.

But where does the whole "camp" thing come from?

Very simple.

The NCAA barred its members from having tryouts to determine who would get a scholarship, but they allow schools to "help" student athletes by having camps where high school athletes can receive skills instruction from college coaches, and of course the campers run a 40 and maybe even lift weight and get advice on how to improve with of course that data recorded and at the end of many of these instructional camps a coach will tell a player that if they want it, they have a scholarship offer.

So the camp business is really exploiting a loophole to continue to have to tryouts and out-of-state camps are loophole within the loophole.

Yet you can clean it all up by deregulating tryouts, though I'll wager a number of Division II and III schools would be very unhappy if you did.

Another point of deregulation need is coaches commenting on potential student-athletes. Right now unless you are a savvy kid or have an adult in your life who really knows what is going on, kids generally have little idea who else a school is recruiting at their position. If coaches spoke freely about recruiting, the kid who thinks he is school X's top QB prospect, may learn he's #3 and rather than listening to love talk from an assistant who really wants him to be the man for the Fighting Celery Stalks but won't take his commit he would move on spend his recruiting time with school Y and be the #1 QB prospect for the Red Cats.