Recruiting means doing more with less.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

If you've made a major financial investment in lobster futures, the NCAA recruiting task force isn't your friend.

Because when the NCAA adopts new recruiting rules by the end of the summer, expensive lobster tails at upscale restaurants will be off-limits as the meal of choice when football recruits make their annual visits to college campuses.

Less ostentatious training-table food will be on the menu instead. If you've checked the size of college football players lately, such fare seems to be getting the job done.

As for other proposed changes ...

When the NCAA Board of Directors, which will be briefed on the matter Thursday, adopts emergency legislation in August, implementing new rules to govern recruiting visits effective in the coming school year, the basic structure of college recruiting really won't have changed that much.

It will simply be a slimmed-down version of the same beast.

For Oregon and other schools that must recruit far from their population bases, the tenuous good news so far is that the most drastic changes in recruiting practices - reducing the number and duration of official visits (five, at 48 hours each) - didn't have much support in a preliminary report to the NCAA Management Council last week.

The Oregon view is that reducing the number of official visits would work in favor of the universities in larger metro areas and work against Oregon, which believes it has plenty to show recruits if only they'll visit, even if it's their fourth choice for a visit, or their last.

(The NCAA News reports that only about 6 percent of football prospects take all five allowable visits; 85 percent take three or less.)

The NCAA is certainly heading toward some rules changes that will have a direct bearing on how Oregon recruits in football.

Using chartered airplanes to fly in recruits? That practice seems as good as gone; Oregon athletics director Bill Moos will campaign to save it, but it's going to be a losing battle, even though the roots of the Oregon practice had more to do with logistics than extravagance.

As any business traveler can attest, Eugene isn't the easiest place to get to, and Oregon didn't want recruits stranded in San Francisco because of weather there, or fog here.

This past recruiting season, Moos said, 41 of the 54 athletes who made official UO visits arrived, several at a time, on contracted charters; on the big weekend that netted the Ducks a bonanza of blue-chip recruits, 22 of 25 came in by charter.

Did it cost more? Sure. "A playing-field leveler for us," Moos said, of competing with schools where getting there isn't an issue.

But Moos isn't going to get any support on this, either from the big-city programs who don't need charters or the smaller programs who can't afford them, and it's going to be about the easiest "reform" the task force recommends.

Bet, too, that "recruiting hostesses" are gone, at Oregon and everywhere else, as are made-up jerseys with recruits' names on them, and other bells and whistles.

Furthermore, universities will have to prove that they've taken steps to prevent the ugly off-field incidents, such as those at Colorado, that prompted this review of recruiting visits to begin with.

(And yet an Oregon-backed proposal to allow schools to pay for a parent to accompany an athlete on an official visit doesn't seem to be getting anywhere.)

Ultimately, Oregon, which so aggressively recruited under old rules, will have to figure out how to do so under the new ones.

"We've been extremely innovative," Moos said. "It's all been above board, and it's been directed toward the `wow' factor, showcasing facilities ... and the things we feel they need to see, which are the academic visits.

"It's not just eat lobster and look at the locker room, but we've been out in front in trying to entice these young men to visit Oregon. ..."

Next year, getting there will take longer, and lobster won't be served. Will that guarantee Oregon and other schools stay out of the wrong headlines? Of course not.