Back in the good old days that probably never existed, top athletes were thought to be relatively passive in their recruitment. They sat back and worked on their school work and played in high school while coaches did the legwork to recruitment. Coaches showed up at their games, reached out on the phone, visited prospects […]
Today the NCAA announced that North Carolina had been cleared of all wrongdoing in the scandal involving no-show classes for football and men’s basketball players. Predictably, that caused an uproar. Except none of those things happened today. The NCAA announced nothing; North Carolina issued a statement. And the statement only refers to the NCAA’s opinion […]
The sanctions on Penn State’s football program got the press, but two other parts of the NCAA’s consent decree with the university might have a more lasting impact on how the university operates going forward. The first was the hiring of an Athletics Integrity Officer, who turned out to be former Senator George Mitchell. The […]
The unofficial visit is, by far, the most misunderstood element of the recruiting process. It starts with the name. There’s nothing “unofficial” about an unofficial visit. A more accurate name would be “self-financed visits,” although even that’s something of a misnomer when schools can give prospects up to three (even five in some cases) free […]
It’s a good measure of the NCAA’s public image that a story about one of the best things the NCAA does for student-athletes was received quite negatively. The Student Assistance Fund is one of the success stories of the NCAA, and something which you would be hard pressed to duplicate if you organized college athletics […]
Of all the ongoing NCAA investigations, none is more vexing than the Oregon case. Miami is a basic extra benefits case, as far reaching as it appears to be. UNC’s smoldering academic scandal is a bit tougher for the NCAA to deal with given the greater deference to institutional autonomy in that area, but the […]
While much of the attention has been focused on other parts of the NCAA’s work following last year’s Presidential Retreat, one of the biggest and most contentious changes will be those coming out of the Rules Working Group. That group is tasked with sliming down the 400+ page Division I Manual (even though the manual […]
CBS Sports is in the middle of a series about the anonymous responses of NCAA Division I men’s basketball coaches to different questions. The series has reached a question that college coaches love more than you might think: what rules they want to see changed? Here are the NCAA-type rules the coaches wished to see changed […]
Earlier today, Kyle Veazey of the Memphis Commercial Appeal broke the news that following an inquiry from the NCAA, a guidance counselor at the high school of Auburn freshman Jovon Robinson resigned after admitting to doctoring Robinson’s transcripts. While it sounds like the story is mostly over for the guidance counselor, it is just starting […]
After the defeat of the $2,000 stipend and delays in rewriting the Division I Manual, last year’s NCAA Presidential Retreat needed another win to go along with multi-year scholarships and regain some momentum. After the Penn State decision, the NCAA and President Mark Emmert are about as popular as they tend to get, which was […]