From free cruises to cash-filled birthday cards: The wild shadow economy of unofficial recruiting visits

In the middle of unofficial visit season this spring, a Power Four general manager spoke with CBS Sports and drifted into a bit of a rant. He complained that his school tried to set up unofficial visits with several recruits, and many of them had the same question:

Can you pay for me to come?

"You see all these guys making multi-day unofficial visits that are basically official visits," the GM said. "These schools are paying for them under the table. Kids are like, 'Well, are you paying for me to come? … 'No. It's an unofficial visit.'

"I just get frustrated. Everybody bitches about, 'Let there be enforcement, let there be rules.' Then the first thing we do when rules come out is how can we skirt by them?"

For those unfamiliar with NCAA recruiting parlance, there are two types of visits players can make: official and unofficial.

Official visits are paid for by schools. Players' travel, lodging and food are taken care of. They can be luxurious. According to The Athletic, Texas spent $280,000 during the weekend Arch Manning and eight other recruits visited campus in June of 2022.

Unofficial visits are different. NCAA rules prohibit schools from paying for almost anything, including transportation, lodging and meals. There are restrictions on how far from campus a staff member and a recruit can interact.

Yet after talking with more than two-dozen sources around college athletics -- from agents to general managers -- one thing became clear during this spring's unofficial visit season: Schools found ways to pay for recruits to visit campus.

From birthday cards stuffed with cash to a top recruit being sent on a cruise after a trip to a school so he couldn't visit elsewhere, schools find ways to get around unofficial-visit rules.

"The schools want to get players on campus by any means necessary," said a high school coach at a prominent school in the Northeast. "The financial incentive is clearly there if you can persuade the parents to come and make it as easy as possible on them."

Schools may be signing high school athletes to six and seven-figure deals, but relationships still matter. "It's the pay-for-play (era), but you still have to get guys on campus," a former high-ranking SEC front office staffer said. "One official visit isn't going to do it."

The practice isn't new. Multiple Tennessee staffers, including head coach Jeremy Pruitt, received multi-year show-cause penalties for what the NCAA labeled a "paid unofficial visit scheme" in 2023.

But the practice has evolved and emboldened teams in the name, image and likeness era.

The new world of NIL has collided with the old world of under-the-table recruiting, creating an environment in which many elite prospects (and their agents) now expect schools to cover the costs of unofficial visits.

"There's a legal and illegal way," said a former Power Four general manager who frequently battled for high-profile recruits. "The illegal way has gone on forever. The legal way has happened the last year or year and a half."

Unofficial Visits Get Expensive

Unofficial visits aren't required for a player to be recruited, but they've become an integral part of the process. Some schools won't actively recruit a player unless he's willing to visit a school unofficially.

Said one agent: "If you don't show the school [that] you're serious, they'll move on."

That can cut both ways, however, because some players simply can't afford the cost of unofficial visits. Assuming a player goes with a guardian to a campus outside of a reasonable driving radius, the recruit's family is responsible for the following things:

• Two flights
• A hotel room
• Meals
• Transportation to and from the airport.

That can be a few thousand dollars in just two or three days. Some families can weather that cost. Others struggle to do so despite those visits sometimes being the only way a player can earn that offer.

"For good players, the money these kids are paying to visit is asinine," a source said. "My quarterback spent $2,000 just to go visit an SEC school."

That QB earned the offer and went on to become one of the top QBs in his class. But those weekend trips add up.

"We absolutely have clients who, if it's not a drive there and back in one day, they're not going to visit," an agent who reps several four-star prospects in the 2027 class said. "It's not because they're entitled. It's because they literally don't have the money."

Thus comes the workarounds.

When a school is really motivated to get a player on campus, they figure out a way.

Said one recruiting facilitator who works with many top recruits: "The ones who aren't (paying) aren't going to be at the forefront. If you're not in that game, I don't think you'll be able to survive."

The Illegal Way

Amid a high-profile recruiting battle for a five-star recruit a few years ago, a collective made a drastic move. They sent a private jet for the five-star and his friends, flying them out to a music festival to garner favor.

On top of that trip, they changed the recruit's phone plan and phone number so the other school they were battling with couldn't call him for a bit.

"There was some creativity," a member of the collective recalled.

The former collective staffer called it the pinnacle of the program's recruiting craziness. But it underscores the lengths teams will go to in order to win a recruiting battle. And a big part of that is unofficial visits.

NIL deals through the collective are a reasonably new avenue for teams to reimburse or compensate players for visiting. But collectives were plenty aggressive about it in the early days of NIL.

A frequent way that collectives get kids on campus is through their 7-on-7 teams during the offseason. The collective would rent a bus and a block of hotel rooms -- putting it in the name of a collective staffer or booster -- and they'd bring entire 7-on-7 teams in for a visit, almost always so they can get one or two in-demand prospects on campus.

The hotel knew the deal. The 7-on-7 coaches did, too.

In the fall, it was even easier. The collective already had hotel room blocks set aside for player families -- travel for player families is often written into contracts -- so what's another five or so rooms for recruits who want to attend a game at the last moment?

"It's not like we were getting audited," the staffer said. "We're not public entities."

There are even more intricate systems built at some schools to skirt the rules. Another former high-ranking SEC staffer described an organization that lived outside the school and the collective specifically designed to aid recruiting.

It was siloed so only a few staffers knew and its express aim was to aid in recruiting. So, if the school wanted to arrange a visit with a certain recruit, it'd have a booster pay for it. The booster would then do one of two things: 1. Pay for the trip, putting the flight and hotel under their name. 2. Send the recruit's high school coach or trainer money (also prohibited by NCAA rules), and they'd accompany the prospect on the trip and cover the travel.

"So, when the recruiting (staff) or compliance would come through and ask how you got here, they'd say: My coach brought me," the source said. "That's all you've got to say. "My coach brought me."

Then there's the most classic example of them all -- cash.

Sources CBS Sports spoke to cited several instances of cash being handed over to cover unofficial visit costs. Once it went in a birthday card to a player's mom. Occasionally, it is sent via an app to the player's agent. Sometimes a booster shows up on the last day of a visit and takes care of it. Some agents don't even know how the money ends up in the families' hands. One agent described a situation with a parent who just said, "They took care of it."

"The easiest way is cash when they get there," said one agent who reps several blue-chip recruits. "Cleanest too, I would say."

Several agents CBS Sports spoke with said that schools will often just book a trip for a player. They're sent the flight details, get picked up at the airport by someone associated with the team and don't pay for anything while on site.

As for how the schools get away with not reporting those expenses, it's mostly creative bookkeeping and planning ahead. Let's say six recruits on an unofficial visit are at a dinner with four staff members. A former high-ranking Power Four front-office staffer said they'd simply file the expense report as if there were 10 staffers on site. Most schools in the SEC have a handful of boosters who have condors and gameday houses they rent out. Some of those are kept for the program on short notice if a high-profile recruit comes into town. Sometimes the school has the agent book the trip and just reimburses them cash on the side.

"It's gotten creative and expensive (since I left)," the former Power Four staffer said.

The Legal Way

A school wanted a high-profile 2026 commit to take an unofficial visit last fall. It was a long flight, so it offered to put a NIL contract together for the player to cover expenses.

The player, per a contract CBS Sports examined, received $10,000 for the trip.

To earn that money, he had to make a tailgate appearance, three Instagram posts -- only one of which had to be on his feed -- and sign 10 memorabilia items. It was perhaps an hour or two of work.

"They flew him out for a game, he did an appearance and got paid," the player's agent said.

In this era of college sports, that's a completely legal way -- albeit the question of fair market value likely looms over contracts like these -- of getting players to visit your campus unofficially.

Because high school NIL deals are legal in 45 states, per Opendorse data, schools have found legitimate ways to compensate recruits for appearances tied to unofficial visits.

College athletics and NIL attorney Mit Winter said in his experience, those deals aren't large. They usually top out at around $10,000 and most are in the low four-figure range.

They're a way to entice athletes to visit a campus and are especially prevalent in situations where a player must take a flight.

"If you're a highly rated player, the chances of you getting some third-party NIL money as part of your unofficial visit … are going to be good," Winter said. "You're probably getting some third-party and NIL money as part of that visit to defray costs and pay for travel."

The legal way is most common for teams on the West Coast or for those who recruit out of region for many of their top targets. A former SEC GM said his school never felt the need to set aside a bucket of money for unofficial visits because most of its recruiting board lived within a few hours' drive of campus.

It's a different calculation for a more rural school or one on the opposite coast from the Southeastern recruiting footprint, which tends to dominate college football recruiting.

"It's a way for some of those teams to level the playing field a bit," the former Power Four general manager said.

Those legal NIL deals go to commits. But they are also frequently awarded to free-agent recruits. Several front-office staffers told CBS that it's a risk to reimburse players who may not commit to their school, but that it's part of the process in 2026.

Not every school is willing to participate. Some schools don't find it worth setting aside a pot of money for unofficial visits when those hundreds of thousands of dollars could be used to compensate a player already on their roster. Some administrations are against it, too and are squeamish about operating in a grey area from a rule perspective.

And while collectives compensating recruits through NIL deals is legal, there is the question of how the College Sports Commission will regulate those contracts in the future.

The CSC does not currently provide any oversight on high school NIL contracts. High school athletes, however, are required to disclose upon college enrollment any NIL deals they signed as high school recruits.

It's unclear how the CSC will enforce a fair-market standard on those contracts.

"Are they going to review them for a valid business purpose or a range of compensation, like they would for a college athlete doing a deal with an associated entity, or is it more just to kind of see what's going on out there?" Winter said. "I don't think there's an answer to that yet."

Asked about the CSC's process of determining whether deals struck during an unofficial visit meet the standard of a valid business purpose, a CSC spokesperson told CBS Sports via email:

"Deals are assessed once submitted to NIL Go. This includes evaluating whether they serve a valid business purpose, meaning the deal is for the promotion or endorsement of goods or services provided to the general public for profit."

That looming uncertainty leads some schools to approach unofficial visits differently.

They turn to the old way.

"I do think some people would rather just not have a paper trail, no contract so nobody ever knows about it" Winter said. "Even if you are allowed to do third-party NIL deals, I think some people would rather just not know what's going on at all."

College football is all about finding an edge.

The future of enforcement

The CSC has not released data on whether or not any high school deals have been rejected. But one thing is clear -- teams aren't living in fear.

"People are doing whatever they want," the former Power Four GM said. "The teams that are aggressive and calling (the CSC and NCAA's bluff) are executing at a high level."

That reality frustrates programs that attempt to operate fully within the rules.

"You thought (unofficial visit payments) would decrease because of NIL, but it's actually increased," an SEC staffer said. "I don't know why. It's still illegal. Teams get in trouble for it. We can't wrap our heads around it. Some teams aren't saying I'll reimburse you. They're saying straight up they'll book it. How do they not get caught?"