Clemson’s Swinney, Alabama’s Saban allied against satellite camps

College football has been known to push the envelope to see how far it can take things.

So how do you feel about Michigan running a “satellite camp” in the fertile recruiting ground of Florida or Georgia?

It’s a Big Ten practice that’s becoming all the rage – much to the chagrin of Southern schools – and a huge debate.

Camps are critical to the lifeblood of recruiting, so much so that Northern schools have found a way to skirt the rules. NCAA bylaws state college football programs can have camps on campus, anywhere within the state or within a 50-mile radius if out of state.

You don’t have to be a geography major to know that Ann Arbor, Mich., is no where near Orlando, Fla. The Wolverines, run by new coach Jim Harbaugh, also are going to set up shop in Alabama and Texas.

They aren’t the only ones. Penn State is coming to a town near you. The Nittany Lions will be in Charlotte this summer, and will also visit lovely Norfolk, Va.

Urban Meyer said you can probably expect Ohio State, fresh off a national championship, to be joining this invasion from the North as well.

Coaches in the South are not happy.

“If we’re all going to travel all over the country to have satellite camps, how ridiculous is that? I mean, we’re not even allowed to go to all-star games,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said this week. “But now we’re going to have satellite camps all over the country? It doesn’t really make sense.”

It does if you’re running a team up North. There’s a loophole that allows coaches to be “guests” if they hold these camps on other college campuses. So Penn State, which visited Atlanta last summer, will work prospects out at Davidson College, a small-time program that also benefits from this recruiting practice.

“I think from a conference standpoint, we in the ACC and SEC have had rules against that for several years,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said. “I think it’s a loophole that people are taking advantage of and I think it’s something that needs to be addressed. I don’t think it’s a good thing because, ultimately, what happens instead of having camps you’re having combines.”

In college football, the best players are in the South. It’s been that way since people began migrating from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt decades ago. Logistics are logistics. And coaches know having prospects who live in proximity to their school makes the process a lot easier.

“My philosophy is we put a tremendous amount of emphasis on our camp here at Clemson and I want to get guys here on campus,” Swinney said. “That’s the best part of everything that we do from a recruiting standpoint. We can go out on the road and recruit and evaluate and do the things that we need to do, but we want to get guys here to Clemson because we know if they come we’ve got a good shot from a recruiting standpoint.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2015 at 1:20 PM with the headline "Clemson’s Swinney, Alabama’s Saban allied against satellite camps."