College Football Kickoff Prelude: My Thoughts on Rodriguez-Gate

If Ohio State is defending Michigan, as Jim Tressel did with regards to the allegations that Rich Rodriguez was violating NCAA limits on practice time, you know something’s gone bananas. That’s like cats and dogs deciding to work in harmony.

Tressel’s point seems to be that the NCAA limits are too low, and the players themselves want to get in more workout time because they need it to be the best they can be.

Strictly from the perspective of the teams—at least the big-name teams like Ohio State and Michigan—a lifting of the limits would seem to be a no-brainer.

From the NCAA’s perspective, the limits, like all their regulations, serve two purposes.

First, they protect academics. Time spent on the practice field or in the weight room is time not spent on schoolwork. If players want more time on the practice field than they’re allowed, their priorities are mixed up because they’re supposed to be a student first and an athlete second, not a pro athlete in all but name and salary.

Of course, we don’t need to get into how college football and basketball barely even pays lip service to that whole “student-athlete” thing anymore, and even from that perspective you could still make a case for lifting limits on practice time. Maybe they’ve already done all their schoolwork, or even if they haven’t, it’s quaint and old-fashioned to insist they do. (The argument that these are “just kids” reaches this same conclusion.)

The second purpose of practice time limits is to protect, and level the playing field for, the small schools that do care about academics and maybe can’t/don’t want to work out as long and hard as the big football schools. But this is tied in with the need to defend academics and results in a similar defense: “don’t punish us because those other schools don’t care about football.”

I don’t know whether the NCAA should or shouldn’t raise its practice time limits, but now you know where the NCAA is coming from, to at least a limited extent.