David Shaw says satellite camps never affected Stanford

Stanford head coach David Shaw has not been one to partake in the satellite camp practice the way former Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh since his arrival at Michigan. As far as Shaw is concerned, there is little use to the practice from Stanford’s perspective.

David Shaw says no reason for satellite camps "where there might be one person in the entire state that's eligible to get into Stanford."

— Ted Miller (@TedMillerRK) April 10, 2016

The Pac-12 was one of the four power conferences to vote in favor of banning satellite camps. Unlike his counterpart at Washington State, Mike Leach, Shaw saw no problem with eliminating satellite camps. Given his point of view, his take is pretty fair. Stanford does operate on a different level when it comes to academic standards compared to many other programs, and it may be fair to suggest the majority of the high school kids participating in some of the football camps may not be able to make the cut for Stanford’s elevated academic standard.

Here is the full context of the quote, as provided by Rule of Tree;

“I have no opinion,” Shaw said. “It’s never affected us. People do them, and people don’t do them. We’ve got great attendance at the camps we have here -- we get a lot of guys we want to come....But I didn’t like the way that a lot of people have put this as the SEC against Jim Harbaugh. That’s not what this has been about. Conference by conference, this has been going on for three plus years, since Jim was with the 49ers. This has been a battle. As a conference, we had a long discussion three years ago about what we were going to do about satellite camps....I’m great with whatever college football says, because it doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t make sense for us to go hold a camp some place where there might be one person in the entire state that’s eligible to get into Stanford.”

Shaw has focused on recruiting the talent that he knows will be able to be a part of his program, and that makes sense. Why waste time trying to recruit talent you are reasonably sure will not be able to make the cut at your university? By wasting such time, you could be missing out on talent that could go elsewhere. There is precious little time to waste on the recruiting trail, and Shaw is spot on with his take as far as things are concerned at Stanford. Had he been the coach of another program, he might be singing a slightly different tune.

Follow @KevinOnCFB