NCAA sending wrong message by banning texts

	Many of the nation's top coaches, including Florida's Urban Meyer, use text messaging as a major tool in their recruiting efforts. Charles Sonnenblick/WireImage.com
	MAILBAG Submit a question or an opinion to Stewart. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

The NCAA has spent considerable time and resources the past few years attempting to convince us it's no longer the stuffy, bloated, ivory-tower bureaucracy of old. It claims to be more in touch with the issues facing its members today.

Unfortunately its members -- at least the ones that recently pushed through legislation that would ban text messaging as a form of recruiting correspondence -- couldn't be more out of touch if they'd cast their votes by telegram.

On Thursday, the NCAA's Board of Directors, a group of university presidents that serves as the final arbiter when it comes to passing legislation, will decide whether to rubber-stamp the text-message ban passed last week by the Management Council, a committee of representatives from each of the Division I conferences.

Take a guess which conference initially sponsored this controversial piece of legislation that could drastically impact recruiting methods at the highest level of college football. The Big Ten? Nope. The SEC? Nada. Try the Ivy League.

That's right, folks. In the bizarre, convoluted process that is NCAA rule-making, a non-scholarship, Division I-AA conference can dictate legislation for the nation's biggest football programs. After hearing one too many stories about some kid running up an $800 cell-phone bill from coaches texting him or some coach bragging about sending out 100 texts a day, the Management Council, for lack of a better word, freaked.

Think about this word for a second: banned. It sounds so sinister, doesn't it? Think of some of the other things that are formally banned by the NCAA: Steroids. Agents. Booster payments.

Somehow, text messages have been lumped into this group. Someone ought to warn all those businessmen pounding away on their Blackberries at the airport and all those 15-year-olds on the subway navigating their Sidekicks that they're partaking in something that at least one major American organization is about to deem illegal.

"Text messaging is the modern form of communication," said Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, who sent an emergency letter to the Board this week asking that they table the proposed ban for further discussion. "We're in the same position technology-wise as we were when the telephone came into being, and it would be like [the NCAA] eliminating the use of the telephone back then."

Who's to say they didn't try? This is, after all, the same organization that, during the infant days of television in the early '50s, tried to ban its members from participating in live broadcasts. This is the same organization that, upon reading those infamous Willie Williams recruiting diaries a few years back, tried to regulate how nice a restaurant a school can use on official visits.

Clearly, the NCAA and its members do not deal well with change. So it comes as no surprise that, faced with a radical change in the way not just college coaches and recruits, but all of society communicates with each other, the Management Council overreacted.

"It would be a real mistake to do away with text messaging," said Texas coach Mack Brown. "It is the most effective way to immediately communicate with prospects and their families without being intrusive."

The national text-messaging craze may still be in its infancy -- I only sent my first text less than two years ago -- but among certain segments of the population, it has already replaced the traditional phone call, or even e-mail, as the primary form of instant communication. One of those segments happens to be teenagers.

"If you're following the culture, kids who are juniors and seniors in high school, that's the No. 1 way they communicate with each other," Georgia Tech assistant Brian Jean-Mary told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.