NCAA Football Indianapolis

Four months almost to the day after he was suspended for the perennial favorite "unspecified violation of team rules," Kellen Lewis has been reinstated to the IU football team. There is still no word on what, exactly, got Lewis sent to Bill Lynch's Naughty Chair, and it's a good bet we'll never officially know.

This is great news for all 34 fans of IU football, who had to endure the departure of the freakishly good wideout James Hardy, now a Buffalo Bill. The recent resurgence of IU football came largely from the Lewis-Hardy connection, who feasted on the bones of defenses that persistently failed to cover the underneath routes. (Not that I'm bitter about that or anything.)

IU now moves into a Hardy-less future, but having Lewis back calling the signals should provide some much-needed continuity for a team that needs leadership. The Hoosiers installed a no-huddle offense in spring practice, all of which Lewis missed. If Lewis can pick up the new system Indiana could make a run at the top four of the Big Ten, which figures to be as wide-open as it ever has been. If not, well, at least the bowl drought is over.

To say that there haven't been a lot of great moments in the history of Indiana University football is more than an understatement. In 108 seasons of football the Hoosiers have won exactly two conference titles. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the University of Chicago has seven Big Ten football titles, and they quit playing big-time football in 1939.

Terry Hoeppner looked to be the one who could turn it around. He was that rarest of breeds, a proven college coach who didn't consider a stint in Bloomington to be an act of violence against his professional reputation. Hoeppner arrived from Miami University in 2005 and quickly installed self-confidence in his Hoosiers. He wasn't able to get them to a bowl game in his first two seasons, but anybody who followed the Big Ten had to figure it was just a matter of time.

Time, unfortunately, was running out. Hoeppner had a brain tumor and, following a rigorous course of treatment, the university announced that he would not coach in 2007. A few days after IU's announcement, Hoeppner died.

There are times you just wish the clock could stand still for a few days or weeks. But it doesn't, ever. The Hoosiers had only a little time to grieve for their coach. Most of us quietly wrote off Indiana's upcoming season, figuring the Hoosiers couldn't recover from the tragedy. We were wrong, of course.

There's a phrase that goes "the perfect is the enemy of the good". In college athletics, the NCAA often expects perfection with rules compliance from schools. when they aren't perfect, they suffer.

We told you recently about LSU's inability to provide peanut butter to its athletes so as to avoid NCAA scrutiny. Now, Colorado's been placed on two years probation after confusion led to them undercharging athletes for athletic department provided meals. It is that confusion which has a former Colorado staffer thinking probation was avoidable.

David Hansburg thinks CU administrators eventually might have realized the issues stemmed from unclear wording in a contract between the athletic department and its food vendors.

"Had the contract been worded differently, and it clearly stated what the food value of the meal was, we would not have been in violation,'' said Hansburg, CU's director of football operations for five seasons under former coach Gary Barnett and one season under current coach Dan Hawkins. "I think 95 percent of the universities out there would have looked at all the evidence available and not considered it a violation. "(But) we called the fire department, and they're going to come."

Simple confusion once again may have trampled an athletic department otherwise doing its best to reasonably provide for its athletes.

It gets better after the jump - learn about how some athletes skipped meals altogether.

The National Athletic Trainers Association recently released a report discussing sickle cell issues. Although they only "suggest but don't recommend" screening, they apparently are looking for increased awareness to sickle cell related issues as several young athletes have died from the condition in recent years.

The sickle cell gene is inherited. NATA says it is most common in people (including one in 12 African-Americans) originating from malarial regions and that "over the millennia, carrying one sickle cell gene fended off death from malaria."

Sickle cell trait differs from the disease sickle cell anemia, in which two sickle cell genes are present.

"It's typically a benign condition ... outside of an intense, sustained physical activity," said Scott Anderson, head athletic trainer at the University of Oklahoma and co-chair of NATA's sickle cell task force.

I think college football and basketball counts as a sustained physical activity. The good news is that according to the AP story, 64% of colleges responded to a survey saying they screen for sickle cell traits. Neither the NCAA or NATA appear to feel alarmed about the issue, although voluntary universal screening by member institutions would be a wise move assuming the costs aren't prohibitive.

I'm not much for the NCAA mandating things to schools and am not urging their energies here. However, this seems like a common-sense preventative health issue to make athletes aware that they may have a condition that could cause harm under physical strain. It would behoove schools to at least be aware of this and consider screening if they haven't already.

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that NCAA President Myles Brand was paid $895,000 in salary, benefits and expenses last year. What for?

University of Hartford president Walter Harrison, whose term as head of the NCAA's executive committee ended in April, said Brand is doing a "spectacular job."

"The job is incredibly challenging in a way most people wouldn't recognize," Harrison said. "Most people think of the major headlines -- congressional inquiries, overseeing academic reform, the controversies of the day. But there are lots of other things, like how one keeps the peace among numerous constituencies. And, he's running a $500 million organization."

So, the parts of his job that nobody knows about, he handles with enough aplomb to merit 4% and 3% raises in the last two years. Cool. No problems there.

The problem is, the part of his job that people do see --- they tend to think he sucks at it. Congress is breathing down the NCAA's neck as it considers eliminating its tax-exempt status. There's a pending class-action lawsuit filed on the behalf of former and current athletes who are seeking greater compensation. In the college football world, the NCAA's weak investigation and enforcement powers, silly and inflexible rules and tone-deaf handling of something so basic like the clock rules have people furious with NCAA leadership. There's also that little supplement issue where schools are afraid to give their athletes peanut butter for fear of breaking the rules.

And then there's the kicker, Brand's stated position of having the NCAA's mission overlap with "social advocacy". Last I checked, social causes weren't really part of the organization's fundamental mission.

In fact, it looks like a perverse overreach and has eroded public trust in the organization. Save the advocacy for groups professionally committed to those tasks who have the expertise and clarity of mission to pursue such causes. The NCAA has other fish to fry and frankly I'm not sure it has done a superb job at handling some of its more pertinent, basic, fundamental issues.

I don't find fault with Brand drawing such an impressive salary. I'm a capitalist - I say more power to him and may he find ways to make much more money through whatever legal avenues he can. But I am curious and deeply skeptical as to whether he's earned it and whether both Brand and the NCAA can do better for what he is being paid.

(H/T: The Wiz)

The NCAA regulates what kind of supplements and drugs universities can provide to their scholarship athletes. This is a good thing. However, some of their rules and regulations create problems. Says LSU Strength and Conditioning coordinator Tommy Moffitt:

"The NCAA came out with rules which say that we can't give muscle-building products.

"If we give [the athletes] weight-gain products, there must be a limit of 30 percent protein. That means all the rest, 70 percent, is bad stuff like sugar. Really, we couldn't give them peanut butter or milk. I've never understood that rule."

Strange, but it gets worse. A burden has been placed on the athletes who are quite often far less versed in the supplement world as to what's good or bad, legal or illegal.

When athletes are unable to get supplements from their school, they must go to other places – namely, health food stores. Now, difficulties can surface.

"It's so strict as to what we can give them, it forces the athletes to go to health food stores," Moffitt said. "(LSU Senior Associate Athletics Trainer) Shelly Mullenix and I evaluate what the athletes can and can't use.

"Our kids go to health food stores and ask if the supplements contain something that will cause them to fail a drug test. Some stores know the rules. But, there are some unscrupulous salesmen out there."

As a result, the LSU players are told to bring the products they purchase to Moffitt before they use them.

"We ask the players to bring to me what they buy," Moffitt said. "It never fails that someone brings something that would make him fail a drug test.

"By going to health food stores, it forces the players to buy things on their own. The players are more exposed to something that can make them fail a drug test."

So what we have here in some situations is cases of athletes potentially suffering punishment that could have been avoided if the schools had more leeway to provide supplements. Any accidental failure of an athlete thus becomes the athlete's fault but the school will also suffer in having lost the contributions of said athlete and prestige from a preventable drug test failure.

Last Wednesday, Congress allocated some time to addressing the "lack of minority head coaches in college and NFL" issue. It's a serious and worthy issue, but I think for a while now its biggest advocates have been going about things inefficiently.

The basic assumption for some may be that the combination of "old boys networks" and just plain discrimination are the biggest obstables getting in the way of legitimate opportunities for minority head coaches. Although it's insane to argue in the face of that, I will say it may not be the major stumbling block preventing more hirings.

I think the real issue is a lack of minority coordinators.

Coaching is a funny business. Besides the informal buddy-buddy networks that do create opportunities for those within them, one other feature is fairly dominant: the Order of Operations. In school many years ago we all probably learned how to solve certain mathematic equations through the word PEMDAS. That is, Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract.

Just as there's a natural order to basic math functions, there is a general order to ascending the coaching ladder. Although college and the NFL blend, young coaches must generally climb successive similar rungs to become head coaches.

In college, one's first position is often as a graduate assistant. The GA's are the lowest on the totem pole, often assisting position coaches and whatever else the head coach asks of them. After serving as GA's, they may jump to another GA spot at another school or be hired as an assistant/positition coach. Several years should follow at multiple schools assisting with various positions, learning lots of new ideas and ways to do things and networking with coaches from more than one school of thought.

Eventually, talented assistants will rise to the top and become offensive and defensive coordinators. This is a key point in a coaching career, because becoming an OC or DC is a lot like having that college degree, it gets you places. One also must manage an entire side of the ball, develop an offense or defense, develop game plans, create an agenda for the position coaches to follow and report to and work with the head coach. It's a lot of responsibility and one of those "sink or swim" jobs that can either elevate or destroy a career.

From a coordinator's position is where many coaches will launch their head coaching careers. There's almost no way around it except for a handful of coaches who somehow "pass go" without having been a coordinator (Mississippi's Ed Orgeron, for example).

A lack of minority head coaches indicates, at least in my mind, a lack in number or quality minority offensive and defensive coordinators. This should be the real push for those looking to see the necessary increase in minority head coaches. Lawsuits and embarrassment can only go so far when it's only reasonable that if there aren't many minority coordinators there won't be many head coaching opportunities.

Now, I don't have the hard data on how many minority coaches are coordinators in college and the NFL, but it makes sense that if talented minority coaches can saturate those ranks, head coaching opportunities will only continue to increase. Maybe I'm wrong and the proportion of minority coordinators is substantial enough that there should be more head coaches, but the coordinator issue remains important just the same.

And they may just get one.

In fact, they'd join Division I in either the bowl or playoff subdivision. Not bad for an upstart program.

The issue was put to a vote within the student body. The results indicate that among participating students (38%), they're willing to support some form of a jump in student fees to accomodate the team and the majority are willing to travel modest distances to attend a home game.

The snag is that because UNC-Charlotte isn't a big-time program - its athletic teams are funded mostly through student fees. If the upkeep related to an average football team is in the millions of dollars, that comes out to a great many extra dollars on top of the usual college expenses mix of tuition/books/board/food/liquor. The Charlotte Observer puts a rough cost estimate at $8 million/year.

Students are already paying $450 in fees which may jump several hundred more dollars if the school adds football to its athletic department. A panel of impressively credentialed people has been assembled to study the issue further. Stay tuned, as they should be finished within a year.

(H/T: Google Alerts)

Back in the day when the NCAA wasn't so rule happy and quasi-repressive, competing teams were allowed to wear similar uniforms. Certain teams could wear their Saturday finest home uniforms, and their opponent could do the same. This was aesthetically pleasing and created something of a tradition between cross-town rivals USC and UCLA.

Those days are gone however, and we're left with NCAA Rule I, Article 3 (a):

Players of opposint teams shall wear jerseys of contrasting colors, and the visiting team shall wear white jerseys.

White jerseys per Rule I, Article 3 (b) are defined as follows:

A white jersey is one with only contrasting playing numbers, player's name, school name, NCAA Football logo, school insignia, conference insignia, mascot insignia, game insignia, memorial insignia or the American flag attached.

In other words if I'm home you're wearing the road uniforms or one of us is getting docked a timeout. To put it kindly, this is lame.

I guess the reasoning was that back in the day with people still owning black and white televisions it was difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Times have changed and the dinosaurs who before owned black and white TV's are now the ones who have yet to hop on HD train. With technology and the great American wealth machine doing the sport a favor, it's time to put the kibosh on this rule and restore a particular tradition within one of the game's great rivalries.

There's a famous painting of the 1967 USC/UCLA game well known to fans of both schools. In it, Trojan tailback O.J. Simpson is seen near the goal line amid a pile of football bodies. His home cardinal and gold complements the powder keg blue and gold of UCLA's players attempting to prevent a touchdown run. It's a beautiful scene and for a while was representative of the rivalry until the rule came into use some years later.

There's been talk in recent years of reviving this tradition, but neither Trojan coach Pete Carroll nor UCLA coach Karl Dorrell has been willing to part with timeouts to make it happen. This is tragic - but hopefully the NCAA can get around to either giving these teams an exemption or modifying the rule somehow to add just a little more tradition and prestige to this great game.

I've added the YouTube video of Simpson's famous 64-yard touchdown run below. The 1967 game was actually one of the better college football games ever played, matching number one UCLA against number two USC. The stars were UCLA's eventual Heisman trophy winner quarterback Gary Beban and USC's Heisman runner-up and 1968 winner tailback O.J. Simpson. USC would win 21-20 thanks to Simpson's run, catapulting them to the national championship.

Let's try a little exercise for a moment here. Close your eyes and think of a 'crooked' college football program. What comes to mind? USC? Florida State? Ohio State? Alright now close your eyes and think of a 'clean' college football program. Now what comes to mind? Penn State probably tops that list what with Joe Paterno and all the talk of doing things the right way, right?

But is there really a significant ethical difference between many of these schools?

Let's take a closer look at Penn State for a moment. They've spent the greater part of four decades cultivating an image as college football's white picket fence and apple pie team. They are led by the amiable, cuddly and grandfatherly Joe Paterno, among the most respected coaches in the game's history. They wear simple blue and white uniforms without names on the backs. They play in gritty central Pennsylvania and graduate their players.

But beneath that veneer is just enough to make you wonder.

The big recruiting hoopla this week was over USC's alleged recruiting violation in pursuit of Joe McKnight. USC coach Pete Carroll allegedly had McKnight directly or indirectly speak with Reggie Bush, a no-no per NCAA rules as Bush and all former players are considered boosters.

Well guess what, Penn State is perhaps just as guilty of a similar violation. When the Nittany Lions hosted tailback Broderick Green a few weekends ago, he met at least two former Nittany Lion players: Larry Johnson Jr. and Tamba Hali.

Broderick Green took an official visit to Penn State two weeks ago and came back very excited about his time in Happy Valley. He got to speak with Larry Johnson Jr. and Tamba Hali as the two were in town for the weekend.

"He called me from Penn State and he was so excited," [Green's Mother Wilma] Mrs. Murdock told BWI. "When he wasn't calling me, I was calling him. He loved the place and fell in love with the players."

Exsqueeze me? Whistle blowing time here. Based on what we've learned from the Joe McKnight situation this sounds like a similar recruiting violation. Last I checked Hali and Johnson are big name former Nittany Lions who are clearly classified as Boosters in NCAA rulespeak.

Noticeably absent is the requisite media firestorm about this apparent violation.

Update: Several commenters add that for various technicalities this is in fact not a violation. Apparently booster contact is illegal, except when it isn't illegal. Iike I wrote yesterday, welcome to the hell that is NCAA bylaws.