If you've followed this space at all in the past couple months you've probably noticed multipleposts on the NCAA's wholesale texting ban as it gets passed by every level of the NCAA bureacracy. One might think that surely this rule has been passed and passed again and is now just a rule set to kick in August 1st. One would be wrong:
Thirty-four schools have asked for an override of a decision by the rules-making Board of Directors to prohibit the practice, limiting electronically transmitted correspondence to recruits to e-mail and faxes. ... Thirty requests were needed to throw the rules change back to the board, which meets Aug..9. If it doesn't rescind or amend its decision, all 326 Division I schools will vote on the issue during the NCAA's annual convention in January. A five-eighths majority is needed to override.
So take heart, cell phone companies of the world, your best customers may not be out of business yet. Even if the ban stands up to this protest, it's likely to be a cosmetic change. In a world suffused with Sidekicks and Blackberries where even my $50 Samsung comes fully email-ready, mildly irritating correspondence will just move to still-unregulated email; how long before it becomes a de-facto text message capability? Answer: not long.
Today, the NCAA Basketball Oversight Panel is expected to formally approve moving the men's 3-point line back 12 inches to 20 feet 9 inches. This is a very good thing for men's college basketball, as the number of 3-point shots attempted in a game has now reached an average of 34% of the total shots. The only downside, is that it won't go into effect until the 2008-09 season.
Aesthetically, there are some issues as the women's line will remain at 19' 9". That means two lines on the court only a foot apart from each other (possibly 3 in places such as Madison Square Garden and the Continental Airlines Arena which are also NBA facilities). Not the best visual.
It's also a potential headache for players and officials. In the midst of the game action the men will have to be behind the right line or end up with a two. Officials will have to keep it straight, and be sure they are crediting a correct 3-point shot. It's easy to envision moments of confusion where an official credits a 3 by mistake when the player is behind the women's 3-point line.
Apparently there are a couple choices that the panel will be considering over the next year to deal with the potential confusion ($ article).
There will be two separate lines of contrasting colors. Rules committee chair Larry Keating, an associate athletic director at Kansas, is proposing to have a one-foot wide band instead of two separate lines. He wants to see the women play off the front of the band and the men off the back. The intent is to have a vote next year for either the two lines or a one-foot band.
A solid 12 inch band might be visually brutal, but it not as bad as two separate lines of contrasting color. It would also be less confusing for officials and players.
Coaches don't know if junior college basketball will return to the level of 15 years ago, but they expect more talent to be spread across the country and for it to have added relevance on the national recruiting scene.
What hasn't been mentioned is how much the NBA will hate this. The NBA, when they stopped direct jumps from high school to to the pros, was acting to improve their product. An additional benefit was no longer needing to scout high school kids. A benefit in terms of cost and spreading their scouts too thin domestically. They could finally focus most of their US scouting on the kids playing D-1 college ball. They could see the kids playing against higher competition and with better coaching.
With the expected influx of talent that will have to go to junior colleges, NBA scouts will once again have to spread further and thinner to watch kids. Kids who after one or two years at junior college may opt for the draft rather than add another year or possibly two at a traditional college. This on top of the ever growing international scouting.
Every time a newspaper reporter deigns to cover the seedy world of recruiting these days you invariably get paragraphs upon paragraphs about the text messaging phenomenon that's swept through the land in the past few years. Coaches are strictly prohibited from calling recruits during extensive "dead periods" during the year, but no such restrictions exist for texting, so the coaches just text "call me lol" to the kids and the dead periods designed to give players time off from being pitched become expensive exercises in acronym deciphering. It's pretty stupid and should be banned.
The NCAA management council plans to start tackling that Monday and Tuesday in Indianapolis when it debates an Ivy League proposal that would ban all text messages. Among major concerns cited by school officials and athletes are the cost, which recruits sometimes bear, and privacy.
Kudos to the Ivies for bringing this up; the NCAA will also look at Myspace and Youtube and blogs and such, as the NCAA's archiac rulebook is way behind the times:
Aside from exposing potentially embarrassing photos or messages, Brand and Hickey already have gotten reports of social sites being used as a recruiting venue. Because of alias usernames and privacy protections, it's sometimes impossible to determine potential NCAA infractions. Boosters, for instance, are prohibited from contacting recruits.
Back in the day when the NCAA wasn't so rule happy and quasi-repressive, competing teams were allowed to wear similar uniforms. Certain teams could wear their Saturday finest home uniforms, and their opponent could do the same. This was aesthetically pleasing and created something of a tradition between cross-town rivals USC and UCLA.
Players of opposint teams shall wear jerseys of contrasting colors, and the visiting team shall wear white jerseys.
White jerseys per Rule I, Article 3 (b) are defined as follows:
A white jersey is one with only contrasting playing numbers, player's name, school name, NCAA Football logo, school insignia, conference insignia, mascot insignia, game insignia, memorial insignia or the American flag attached.
In other words if I'm home you're wearing the road uniforms or one of us is getting docked a timeout. To put it kindly, this is lame.
I guess the reasoning was that back in the day with people still owning black and white televisions it was difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Times have changed and the dinosaurs who before owned black and white TV's are now the ones who have yet to hop on HD train. With technology and the great American wealth machine doing the sport a favor, it's time to put the kibosh on this rule and restore a particular tradition within one of the game's great rivalries.
There's a famous painting of the 1967 USC/UCLA game well known to fans of both schools. In it, Trojan tailback O.J. Simpson is seen near the goal line amid a pile of football bodies. His home cardinal and gold complements the powder keg blue and gold of UCLA's players attempting to prevent a touchdown run. It's a beautiful scene and for a while was representative of the rivalry until the rule came into use some years later.
There's been talk in recent years of reviving this tradition, but neither Trojan coach Pete Carroll nor UCLA coach Karl Dorrell has been willing to part with timeouts to make it happen. This is tragic - but hopefully the NCAA can get around to either giving these teams an exemption or modifying the rule somehow to add just a little more tradition and prestige to this great game.
I've added the YouTube video of Simpson's famous 64-yard touchdown run below. The 1967 game was actually one of the better college football games ever played, matching number one UCLA against number two USC. The stars were UCLA's eventual Heisman trophy winner quarterback Gary Beban and USC's Heisman runner-up and 1968 winner tailback O.J. Simpson. USC would win 21-20 thanks to Simpson's run, catapulting them to the national championship. Sorry, No Photos
If you've followed this space at all in the past couple months you've probably noticed multiple posts on the NCAA's wholesale texting ban as it gets passed by every level of the NCAA bureacracy. One might think that surely this rule has been passed and passed again and is now just a rule set to kick in August 1st. One would be wrong: 
Today, the NCAA Basketball Oversight Panel is expected to 
There's been talk about how the 
Every time a newspaper reporter deigns to cover the seedy world of recruiting these days you invariably get paragraphs upon paragraphs about the 
Back in the day when the NCAA wasn't so rule happy and quasi-repressive, competing teams were allowed to wear similar uniforms. Certain teams could wear their Saturday finest home uniforms, and their opponent could do the same. This was aesthetically pleasing and created something of a tradition between cross-town rivals USC and UCLA.
