One of the Dumber NCAA Ideas

The NCAA has proposed cutting the non-championship segments of seasons for several college sports including lacrosse (the spring sports fall "exhibition" season) and soccer (the fall sports spring"exhibition" season). Reasons for this would seemingly include student-athlete welfare, more focus on academics and cost cutting.

This is one of the dumbest ideas to achieve this.

First of all 80% of all of the NCAA problems come from Division I Football and Basketball. Lots not focus on the 20% and pretend that's going to solve the problem.

One easy way to make academics more important would be to be much stricter on GPA's required to be eligible to compete. Raise it from a 2.0 to a 2.5 or a 2.7. Freshman are eligible right away, after their first semester they need to have that GPA or they are ineligible. That's a simple way to make academics important.

I also like the idea of banning teams from postseason competition for poor academic progress. That's fine. This incentive to study should help create good academic cultures on teams. Some teams do actually have a culture that finds academic excellence to be important. Coaches usually set that up.

If the NCAA claims that their student-athletes don't have enough time to study than maybe they should look at their countable hours system. Rehab doesn't count for hours, and a game day counts for three hours no matter how long the student athlete is busy. Why don't you count those "uncountable" hours and raise the limit for a countable week to 25 hours.

The idea that cutting spring competition will save lots of money is not accurate. Post-Game meals for five days and transportation for three events isn't back breaking for a BCS school's budget. If you want to cut costs you could start to look at ways for football and basketball to do so. The money that those sports have give them all the power, and idea that they need to skirt around the rules to keep that status quo. Cutting costs from the big programs would take some of the egos and problems out of college sports.

Cutting spring sports only hurts student-athletes. If student-athletes can't handle the demands of both athletics and academics than they probably don't care about one or the other. That's the honest truth. Spring seasons are vitally important for most student-athletes because it gives them a chance to work on their skills and to play in exhibition games that allow younger players, and hard working players a chance to show coaches what they can do. Spring season is so important for coaches and athletes alike.

Why the NCAA is focusing on something as stupid as this is mind boggling. Everyone knows where the problems lie. Basketball and Football.

If the NCAA doesn't focus on changing those sports, and doing drastic things such as providing spending limits on recruiting or salary caps on coaching salaries, than it might be a sign that the NCAA knows it has no power over Division I BCS programs. Maybe it knows that if it does real reform, than those schools will simply leave the NCAA and play under their own governing umbrella.