Just weeks after Southern California Coach Lane Kiffin, who was the coach at Tennessee when the transaction is said to have occurred, appeared to have escaped N.C.A.A. scrutiny from his tumultuous tenure as the Volunteers’ coach, the Yahoo Sports report pulled him back into the N.C.A.A. cross hairs.
Perhaps more important, the report portrays Garza and the Tennessee staff flagrantly disobeying N.C.A.A. rules on unofficial visits. (An unofficial visit is one in which the prospect and his family must pay their way to campus.) Yahoo said Garza paid a third party the money for Seastrunk and his mother to make the trip in July 2009 using a MoneyGram, even providing the receipt.
Coaches, recruiting analysts and an N.C.A.A. official said in interviews that illegal payment for a prospect’s unofficial visit was one of the most commonly manipulated N.C.A.A. rules. While the importance of unofficial visits has increased because of the speeded-up recruiting calendar with unofficial commitments, there is little scrutiny of how prospects and their families pay for the visits.
“It seems to be a real concern,” said Rachel Newman Baker, an N.C.A.A. managing director of enforcement, who said the N.C.A.A. had been studying the issue in both football and basketball. She added, “As we’ve been doing our outreach and meeting with folks, it seems like this has been on top of the list.”
On an official recruiting visit, a prospect’s travel, hotel and meals can be paid for by universities while the prospect visits campus, according to N.C.A.A. regulations. Those visits cannot be taken until the start of the prospect’s senior year of high school.
There are so few perks allowed on an unofficial visit that a university cannot pick up a prospect at the airport or pay for a hotel stay. The N.C.A.A. rulebook has four pages on official visits and one and a half on unofficial visits.
“Behind the scenes in college basketball, people will tell you that the unofficial visit is one of the bigger problems facing recruiting right now,” the ESPN basketball recruiting analyst Dave Telep said. “It’s a place where things can be easily manipulated by third parties. At the same time, I have no idea how you can fix it.”
The problem appears to be as pervasive in college football as it is in basketball. The former coach Urban Meyer said that in the later part of his six-year tenure at Florida, he heard about abuses elsewhere of the unofficial visit rule.
“I’d ask my assistants, ‘Why is this kid not visiting us?’ ” Meyer said. “They’d say, ‘Coach, we’re not paying for his trip.’ ”
According to Drew Cannon, a Duke student who does research for Telep, 51 of Telep’s top 100 senior basketball prospects had already unofficially committed to universities by Sept. 1. Nearly all of the top 100 had made unofficial visits.
Brad Stevens, the Butler men’s basketball coach, said that 90 percent of the official visits during his tenure had involved players who had already made commitments to the Bulldogs.
Because prospects cannot make official visits until the start of their senior year of high school, the official visit has become more of a ceremonial showcase of campus than a critical part of the recruiting calendar.
“It’s totally changed, I would say, in the last five years,” said Dan Dakich, a former college head coach and assistant who now coaches travel basketball and hosts an Indianapolis radio show. “Kids are committing so much earlier, and parents totally understand the process. The people I deal with say, ‘Can you help us get him on campus?’ ”
And that is where problems can occur, especially in a time when unemployment, gas prices and airfares are high.
“I see guys flying across the country or regionally like it’s a rock star tour,” Telep said. “Knowing what I know about some of those situations, I don’t know the means of where this is coming from.”
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