NCAA and NYT Going at it

http://chronicle.com/article/The-NCAA-Wades-Into-a-War-of/130738/#top

Sorry if this is a DB, but I didn't see it on here.

Great read here. The NCAA is really starting to become juvenile.

My favorite paragraph.

 

When the judges file their cards, they will not be smiling at the NCAA.

 

The NCAA is like the Moody's bond raters, you expect them to be the smartest people in the room given their role, yet they are the lowest paid, hence the least smartest ones.

 

When I joined Continental Airlines, to run their sports marketing department, we were the official airline of the NCAA. I was excited to work with them. I assumed they were among the best in the business.

They were the worst. The actual employees were dim and immature. They didn't understand the goals of their corporate sponsors.

Host Communications worked with them at the time, and tried their best. But, the NCAA, in their infinite wisdom, jettisoned Host the minute they got an offer for more money, despite the fact that Host had built the NCAA's sponsorship business.

The company they sold the rights too promptly went bankrupt. (ISL, who also held FIFA's rights.)

The NCAA also dropped it's long time sponsor Pepsi for Coke in 2003, despite Pepsi being on board from the beginning and having spent millions developing the NCAA's brand.

We dropped the NCAA when our contract was up. They didn't deliver any value, and weren't interested in trying to do so.

 

A couple of my favorite paragraphs:

"At what point does somebody with the power to make it stop say this has gotten out of control?" the NCAA's Dave Pickle recently wrote on an association blog. "The NCAA is not perfect, but there's plenty of room between being perfect and being the goon squad that Nocera projects."

(Um, Mr. Pickle, you guys are the ones with the power to make this whole thing about treating athletes like shit stop. You've only just started to do so after being in business for 106 years. And yeah, you guys have had a very long history of acting like a goon squad. And you still are (i.e. the St. Joe's kid who isn't allowed to play after transferring to UAB).

"In a blog post about inane NCAA rules, he incorrectly reported that the University of New Hampshire had been penalized for allowing an athlete to bring her three-month-old child, who was still nursing, along on a road trip. (She was punished for allowing the child's father to come along.) A bigger gaffe was reporting that the association bars athletes from obtaining legal counsel after they have been accused of violating its rules. "I stand corrected," Mr. Nocera led off in a subsequent column."

(With the UNH athlete, who the hell was supposed to watch the baby while Mommy-Athlete was competing? And as far as legal counsel goes, athletes have needed it because in the NCAA's past, they had very little legal recourse, that is, until they got legal counsel).

 

Least smartest?

 

Everyone's just going to love him!



This goes a lot further than just the NYT. Job 1 for Ronnie Ramos is apparently to shoot the messenger on Twitter

 

Sorry, dumbest.

 

When the NCAA got all pissy about Nocera incorrectly writing that student-athletes weren't allowed legal representation, they forgot that allowing the athletes that "right" (as if the NCAA has that right to give or take away -- obviously the don't) is relatively new for them. Up until the early 90s, they were dragging kids into rooms and telling them they weren't allowed to have a lawyer, or conveniently forgetting the fact. I'm not the biggest Don Yeager fan in the world but it took his book (http://books.google.com/books/about/Undue_process.html?id=1Azyc2LopD0C) to change that.

 

Ramos comes off as a major d-bag in that piece.

 

I read that book a few years back, and knew the NCAA had banned legal representation, but I couldn't find anything to back me up when I wanted to post about it, thanks.

What these NCAA idiots seem to forget is that their organization has a few decades of history that they need to overcome in order to convince anyone that they're telling the truth with anything.

 

How old is Ramos, 10?