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K's Contact - What Duke Was Thinking

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As we said the other day, few programs study the rule book as carefully as does Duke and very little is left to chance. So we were surprised at the notion that seemed to float around that Coach K made an inadvertent violation when he contacted Alex Poythress.

As it turns out, the NCAA will not allow contact while a recruit is participating in an AAU event.  Poythress's team was out of one tournament and awaiting another at the same site.

So the question now is this: can you contact a recruit when he is out of a tournament but still on the road? Duke is asking for an interpretation from the NCAA.

If the rule isn't explicit in this regard, it's hard to see how the NCAA can claim a violation.

This reminds us of several years ago when Duke, reading the manual carefully as we said, scheduled a pre-season overseas trip during fall break, thus getting 10 days of early practice not long before the season started rather than during the summer.

A lot of people screamed bloody murder, and then, when the NCAA said it was in fact permissible, did the same thing themselves as soon as they could.

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