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Has The NCAA By-Law Blog Become An Infomercial?



I was perusing the NCAA By-Law Blog today and ran across this piece about how there was some reason amid the mess in the NCAA today. I gave it my full attention, because by all means, lets please try and figure all of this chaos out. What I found on the NCAA's part is more hypocrisy, combined with a little self serving nonsense from a guy who has no business even commenting on that blog, much less posting. 

Dave Pickle is the Executive editor of the NCAA Champion Magazine.A Subscription magazine that charges about $4 an issue to tout the NCAA and it's member students. A virtuous task at face value, but in the end, he is just another guy trying to sell magazines as part of his job. Does that entitle him to an opinion? Sure. Commenting about the state of the NCAA on a blog that is supposed to be about explaining NCAA regs and rules, I don't think so, but you be the judge. 

John Infante is the original By-Law Blogger. He is an intelligent, well informed, and straight forward speaking individual who has no problem with calling things as he sees them. If you need to know something related to the NCAA By-Laws and compliance, he's your man.

 

However, this newest post is nothing more than self serving puff pastry. And this Dave Pickle is even willing to let someone else do his talking for him. In this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a professor from Duke says that the only way that NCAA violations are going to stop is that if member institutions start valuing an education more than they value a winning record. I do not claim that this argument does not have merit, however, for the NCAA to be touting it's merits this way is not just ridiculous, its self-serving nonsense.

Do NCAA schools need to emphasize education over rule-breaking? Of course. Do they need to be careful who they bring into their schools for athletics? You better believe it. But then again, why limit it to athletes? How is it that athletes are singled out for their "risk"? Something tells me that Professor Charles Clotfelter needs to be really careful how he speaks because his "reasoning" seems to be more of a slander bordering on racism than it does to be a warning about athletics vs. academics.

His points have been covered by a ton of people and are valid to a certain extent, only if you believe that athletics and academics cannot co exist. Lets face it, people of all kinds attend college. Some fail and some succeed, but those can usually be judged on a case by case basis for character and attitude. Claiming that high profile athletes are all "high risk" is making a generalization about a slight few who are not up to the standards against a vast majority who are. People deserve to be accepted on an individual basis, not just lumped in together and categorized. I mean the last time I checked, not one high profile athlete took out a gun and started shooting people on campus, so shouldn't the athletes be worried about others, based on the Professor's approach?

I am going to avoid the obvious insinuations about this guy being a Duke Professor, because frankly, that's too easy. But it bothers me that when I am trying to get information from a trusted source, I have to go through this nonsense along the way.