NCAA's Satellite Camp Ban Could Cost Kids Like This One a Chance at College

Jaeveyon Morton isn't a piece of someone's turf. He isn't a piece of meat. He's not a commodity or a statistic. No, he is a 16-year-old sophomore at Martin Luther King High School in Detroit. He has dreams.

Football talent, smarts, athleticism, a work ethic, a face, a name, hopes and dreams.

"I want to go to college and play football," he says.

The amazing thing is, even though he's only 5'9", he is good enough to achieve this dream.

But money is tight because his dad has health issues. Morton has two older brothers, and one went to college in Illinois for a year, but the bills were too much. So the Mortons brought him home. Then, with the help of some grants and student loans, he went to college another year, this time in Ohio, but the bills still piled too high. He came home.

Will Jaeveyon get to college? Not if he doesn't get a scholarship.

"That wouldn't be realistic," says his mom, Kenthia, who works to support the family.

Jaeveyon Morton is nothing but reality.

Meanwhile, the power brokers within the multibillion-dollar industry of college football are working against him. Oh, they don't know it. Reality isn't on their radar. But that's the result of what they did earlier this month when they banned teams from holding satellite camps, requiring "schools to conduct camps and clinics at their school's facilities or at facilities regularly used for practice or competition."

The power base of college football, the programs in the southeast corner of the U.S., were so freaked out that Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh was invading their territory to steal crumbs off their plates, they pushed a new rule through the NCAA just to keep him away.

But instead of dealing specifically with their Harbaughphobia, they carpet-bombed the hopes and dreams of Jaeveyon Morton and hundreds or thousands of kids like him.

Those kids are unintended consequences. They weren't even considerations in the banning of the camps.

"This rule is about big money, big politics, big egos," said Terel Patrick, assistant head coach and defensive coordinator at Martin Luther King, which is a top Detroit program that regularly produces college scholarship players. "It's 1 percent of decision-makers making decisions for the 99 percent who are affected."

The rule was about protecting turf, and college football is willing to risk letting Jaeveyon fall through the cracks to help teams do that.

What happened is this: Harbaugh came to Michigan last year with endless energy and no regard for tradition. It was Harbaugh being Harbaugh.

Instead of holding his offseason camps for kids just at Michigan, he also started holding them in the South, where much of the country's high school football talent is. SEC and ACC coaches didn't like this, so they led a charge to get the NCAA to adopt a rule against it.

"We all know what the story is here," Kenthia Morton said. "Harbaugh came in, and he moved too fast. It's simply that. And the other schools don't like it."

In fact, many of the coaches involved went as far as admitting their opposition to satellite camps like Harbaugh's was purely self-serving. 

They were thinking about themselves, about their programs, about winning—not about the kids.

For kids like Morton, the new rule will make it infinitely harder to be noticed by college coaches.

"I guess you'd say he's a typical fringe-type of kid," Patrick said. "He's probably a MAC kid."

Again, Morton is 5'9". He was probably never going to have the measurables to end up in a Power Five conference. But playing in the Mid-America Conference is still playing college football.

The satellite camps were great for kids like this. They were a showcase attended by players of all levels and teams of all levels.

College football camps in general tend to get coaches from many different schools working at them. So if Ohio State held a camp on its campus, only a small fraction of the kids there would likely ever get a scholarship offer to play for the Buckeyes. But coaches from other schools were watching, too.

Under this new rule, Morton would have to go around the country, campus to campus, in hopes that someone will take him. The costs can add up.

"He's a good player, but he hasn't been in the forefront on his high school team because he plays behind some 5-star players. He needs these satellite camps to be seen," Kenthia Morton says. "I'm going to have to pick a few camps to go to now, and they're going to have to be close by. I don't know which ones."

The Detroit area is fortunate to have the Sound Mind, Sound Body football camp. Founded by Curtis Blackwell to help kids in his hometown, the camp is not technically a satellite. It is run independently of a specific college, though college coaches fill the place up.

Under the new rule, coaches from FBS programs won't be able to help out anymore.

Sound Mind, Sound Body will still offer instruction from coaches and give kids a chance to showcase themselves. But that will now be in front of coaches from schools with more limited scholarship opportunities like Eastern Illinois and Youngstown State. In the past, coaches such as Notre Dame's Brian Kelly, Ohio State's Urban Meyer and Michigan State's Mark Dantonio have been there.

"I just think they didn't think this ban through," said Blackwell, who is no longer officially at Sound Mind, Sound Body but is instead the recruiting coordinator at Michigan State. "There is no way coaches would want to take opportunity away from kids. No way.

"Until someone tells me that to my face, that they knew this would happen, I won't believe it."

The ban, which conference officials voted on, is still somewhat of a mystery. Officially, no one is saying why it was important. All we know for sure is that after Harbaugh started having camps in the South last year, SEC coaches and officials started complaining, and now we have a ban.

Blackwell said kids pay $90 for a two-day camp, but that's a misleadingly low number. In addition, he said, to come to a camp, a family has to get the kid there and usually stay at least a night or two in hotels. Parents might have to pay for flights. The camps are also usually on weekdays, meaning parents have to get off work to get there.

The costs can add up. And if a trip to an on-campus camp will now put a kid in front of just one school's coaches, then just how many camps will a family have to travel to in order to get the word around about their kid? Will the different schools have their camps on the same days? And if kids start going to one camp after another all summer, what about potential injuries?

The top-rated prospects won't be hurt by the ban. Power football programs will find them. Well-off kids can afford multiple camps.

But when told about Morton's specifics and how a lack of exposure could make the difference between college and no college, Blackwell said this: "Wow, wow, wow. It's the realities of life in the system we have. And in a city like Detroit, it's pretty much do or die. You can't bounce back when things go wrong. People with resources, they can bounce back."

Patrick, Morton's high school coach, points out Iowa's Desmond King won the Jim Thorpe Award as the nation's best defensive back in 2015 despite being a Detroit kid originally projected to play in the MAC. Then he was discovered at Sound Mind, Sound Body.

What happens if he hadn't been discovered?

"The best kids don't always get out of here," Patrick said.

So you can see the fine line in the real lives of kids. That's what college coaches—who are part of our education system, right?—should be thinking about rather than their own turf.

During the offseason, Patrick said, the coaches at King strategically pick a camp or two to send several team members to so they can be seen by the broadest amount of coaches. Last year, he said, they took 14 or 15 kids and some ended up at the top level, Division I, while some went to Division II, some went to Division III (which doesn't offer scholarships) and some went to small-college NAIA.

King's coaches, he said, paid their own way and usually contributed more so kids who couldn't fully afford the trip could go, too. But where will King's coaches take their kids now?

"We'll have one kid in the car with 40 offers and one hoping to get one," he said. "Who is more important? Who is more important? It has been life-changing because of these opportunities."

The hope now is for the NCAA to change the rule back and to allow satellite camps. And there is one force in college football that's more powerful even than the SEC and the NCAA.

Football moms.

Rozlyn Peoples, mother of Detroit Cass Tech 5-star recruit Donovan Peoples-Jones, started a petition to get the ban overturned. She was moved to create the petition when she saw a letter her son had posted on Twitter to show his disappointment with the new rule. In the letter, he talked about how lucky he was to have been able to showcase his football abilities and also to have learned at satellite camps.

"I was fortunate enough to have a great group of family, friends and coaches who have guided and supported me throughout my years of playing football," he wrote. "Unfortunately, many of the athletes in Detroit don't have the same background foundation as I was blessed with."

Rozlyn read it and said, "It almost brought tears to my eyes how appreciative he is. He was taking a stand. I wanted to help raise awareness."

It now has more than 14,000 signatures, many from people who left testimonials about how much the camps helped their kids or about how they don't know what they'll do now.

Peoples said she took her son to one camp in Florida and one in California last year, and it cost roughly $5,000. But, she said, there were at least 35 schools represented at each camp.

"How many camps can you afford to go to?" she said. "A lot of these kids don't have anyone to take them across town, let alone to camps."

She said she knew plenty of kids who would be hurt by the ban and suggested talking with Djuna Barker, mother of Detroit football player Kalon Gervin.

"I'm the mother of five boys, and actually they're all great athletes," Djuna Barker said. "I was married, but my husband passed. When these camps come up, that is actually how the [players] can actually be exposed to different places other than Michigan, Michigan State. Coaches might come from Cincinnati, Iowa, UCLA. To some of these kids, that's the only time they can dream.

"My son is a 4-star now, but he didn't have offers. Like Peoples, he's a really good kid. He didn't get exposed to schools until he went to Sound Mind, Sound Body. The same thing happened with Peoples."

She recommended talking with Kenthia Morton, which brings us back to Jaeveyon.

He has an offer from Akron, but Kenthia said she isn't sure that offer is official or how solid it is. Patrick, his high school coach, said he doesn't feel confident about that, either.

It could still go either way for Jaeveyon.

Gervin and Peoples will get offers. Their mothers speak out anyway, even though the rule doesn't really affect their kids. Peoples figures the more awareness people have of the downside to banning satellite camps, the more pressure there will be to end the ban.

"I got involved from a parent perspective as well as for people who don't have a voice," Peoples said. "These 1-star, 2-star, 3-star kids, that's who this [ban] disenfranchises. That's who I'm concerned for."

Concern for others not as a piece of turf, but as human beings. Someone has to do it.

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report. Follow him at @gregcouch.