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Towson Football Players Allege Practice Violations

In the wake of the release of emails shedding light on Billy Gillispie’s practice violations at Texas Tech, Towson football players are making similar allegations against the head coach, Rob Ambrose. This is the strongest evidence on the player’s side:

Ambrose submitted CARA logs to the Office of Compliance over the summer that show discrepancies between the schedules distributed to the players and the total amount of time on the logs.

On Sunday, Aug. 12, an individual player’s schedule dated Aug. 1 states that the defensive line lifted weights while offensive line performed a “walk through,” or assignment review, from 10:30 – 11:20 a.m. Then from 11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., the lines switched activities.

Later, from 2-2:30 p.m, special teams met and from 2:40 p.m. – 4 p.m. and 7:15 – 8:45 p.m., position meetings occurred.

This totals more than five hours, but on the log, Ambrose reported only three and a half hours of daily activity.

Summer logs are different because teams do not have the same sort of strict hour restrictions on overall activity. Football has detailed preseason practice rules that limits on-field and conditioning work, but much of the time here includes meetings. Which makes the lack of accurate reporting that much more puzzling. If there is no limit to get around, why not report it accurately?

The players allege, and Ambrose admitted, that 6:00 am workouts imposed as punishment were not always recorded. Unless a team routinely practices less than 20 hours per week and four hours per day, using physical activity as punishment is almost impossible. It is a huge task to keep track of which of the 100 players on a football team need to be held out of certain activities because they used up time earlier.

Towson looks to have taken the violation seriously and taken the expect actions, including reviewing paperwork and student-athlete exit surveys, as well as showing up to practice unannounced. But with the release of the story, I would expect the NCAA or CAA to have a look at the results of that investigation.


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