The NCAA is nothing if not bureaucratic. Now they can add one more thing to their rules book: a limit on the number of pages that can be in a media guide.
For the past few years, Chad Moller has been one of the most prolific authors in America. In the summer of 2003, the University of Missouri sports information director produced a 484-page football media guide. Last summer, he followed it up with a 612-page tome.
Not bad when you consider it took Leo Tolstoy five years to knock out "War and Peace," a close cousin to Moller’s books in weight, if not literary significance.
The dual purpose of media guides is to provide reporters information about your team and to convince recruits to join your team - although not in that order of importance. But in recent years, the alarm on the NCAA’s favorite metaphor started screeching. Another "arms race" had broken out.
Last month, the NCAA passed a rule declaring that athletic media guides can be no longer than 208 pages. The rule primarily will affect football and men’s basketball guides. Missouri’s most recent men’s basketball guide was 320 pages.
The logic is that this will save athletic departments money and level the playing field for schools that can’t afford to produce massive books. The irony is that the bylaw was passed by an organization whose manual is 504 pages long and requires a team of experts at each school to interpret it.
As is well known, the NCAA does not allow its members' athletes to receive compensation close to the revenue generated - primarily the football and men's basketball players at many Division IA schools. Since the player's can't be paid based upon their expected performance, programs devise ways to attract the athletes in non-pecuniary fashions. For example, here's a previous post on the use of comic books as recruiting tools. The NCAA responds by banning some of those ways, and programs find new ways around the rules and ways around the new rules. It's a big expensive game.
So, a program is going to violate NCAA rules if its media guide is 208.5 pages long. Now programs are going to have to use resources to make sure that they say what they want to say in 208, resources that have alternative uses. (Assuming the NCAA actually has teeth regarding enforcement of this silly rule). Assuming this new rule actually saves some member schools money, it's silly to think that each school won't spend that money on some different way to recruit athletes or on coaches. Oh well. I'm sure once some school finds a novel way of recruiting, the NCAA will ban that, and the game off the field will go on, and on, and on. But this is what one expects of bureaucracies.