When a board of
college presidents voted in January to downsize the NCAA rulebook with a recruiting deregulation package, the consensus was that
athletics departments with more resources would benefit at the expense of midmajors. And for the NCAA, putting that disparity out in the
open -- even embracing it -- seemed to be new territory.
"Michigan has been Michigan for a long time. Alabama has been a monolith for a long time," NCAA President Mark Emmert said at the time. "We're not going to overcome those natural competitive advantages people have."
But what became clear shortly after the deregulation package was pushed through is that the line of demarcation wasn't between the haves and have-nots. It was between the haves and have-mores.
Last week, after significant push-back from several coaches and athletics directors, NCAA vice president David Berst told USA TODAY Sports the national organization would "modify as necessary" parts of the package. Thursday, the NCAA officially acknowledged that the two most controversial changes -- one that eliminated rules on the size of recruiting staffs and one that eliminated restrictions on printed recruiting materials -- would be put on hold and reworked before the next board of directors meeting May 2.
Just like a $2,000 "full cost of attendance" stipend that Emmert got the board to pass last year, in the hands of the larger membership it was dead on arrival.
Any proposal adopted by the board can be defeated by 75 override votes. Berst said some of the rules had already received override requests and the NCAA would get feedback from those opposed before massaging the controversial parts of the package.
What's most striking, though, is that the opposition leading to Thursday's announcement didn't come primarily from the leagues without the TV mega-dollars. It came from some of the biggest voices within the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference and Texas, all of whom saw Alabama assembling an NFL-style personnel department and wondered how they could make up ground with financial restraints taken off the best program in America. They saw an arms race escalating in college athletics and suddenly were worried about their ability to keep pace, though the truly meaningful stuff such as 85-scholarship limits and practice time on the field never changed.
And for all the criticism the NCAA has taken this year, it illustrates just how difficult it is to get everybody in college athletics on the same page to institute meaningful reforms.
Emmert's goal with deregulation was to eliminate rules the NCAA can't possibly enforce, something that makes complete sense to everybody.
But when it comes down to your budget and your ability to compete against those who might be better at massaging those rules, almost everybody looks around and realizes they're looking up at somebody else.
So nothing changes. Bureaucracy continues. The rule book that so many says is too large stays large. And college athletics remains comfortably dysfunctional within the bounds of its own rules, which always seem so trivial until you start trying to eliminate them.
