NCAA Looking Into Text Message Madness

Every time a newspaper reporter deigns to cover the seedy world of recruiting these days you invariably get paragraphs upon paragraphs about the text messaging phenomenon that's swept through the land in the past few years. Coaches are strictly prohibited from calling recruits during extensive "dead periods" during the year, but no such restrictions exist for texting, so the coaches just text "call me lol" to the kids and the dead periods designed to give players time off from being pitched become expensive exercises in acronym deciphering. It's pretty stupid and should be banned.

And, hey, it just might be:

The NCAA management council plans to start tackling that Monday and Tuesday in Indianapolis when it debates an Ivy League proposal that would ban all text messages. Among major concerns cited by school officials and athletes are the cost, which recruits sometimes bear, and privacy.

Kudos to the Ivies for bringing this up; the NCAA will also look at Myspace and Youtube and blogs and such, as the NCAA's archiac rulebook is way behind the times:

Aside from exposing potentially embarrassing photos or messages, Brand and Hickey already have gotten reports of social sites being used as a recruiting venue. Because of alias usernames and privacy protections, it's sometimes impossible to determine potential NCAA infractions. Boosters, for instance, are prohibited from contacting recruits.

That's probably a reference to "Terrelle Pryor, Come be a Nittany Lion!!!," a Facebook group that Penn State demanded the removal of. "Terrelle Pryor must go to PITT!," on the other hand, remains active.

(Via iBlog For Cookies.)