Institutional Control

From the late 1970s forward, the NCAA has attempted to regulate publicity that no self-respecting university would tolerate from any other academic regulating body or into the realm of state laws.  In what we must see as the opening salvo against diversity in field markings, the NCAA football rules committee attacked both marketing and social media with its new guidelines.

Can we get a ruling on the color of field turf next?  The number of uniforms?  Designs of football helmets?

Is basketball not far behind?

Someone is going to have to explain to me how the purity of the game was impacted by using hash tags and institutional URLs where fans can see them on television.

What I'd like to hear from the football rules committee -- was this driven by pressure from networks to "clean up" the visual space?

Missed on the first pass through was a ban on all cameras in the team area.  Really?  The SEC tried that in several sports. Will all cameras include the live network cameras?  Betcha it won't.  Or they will shoot in from the edges.  That's just another blatant shot at one of the last areas the campus had for it's own programing -- "insider footage" from the official team camera.

And what of those lucrative conference packages that require what are essentially commercial logos -- the conference networks -- to appear on goal posts, on goal nets and sideline spaces?

Just when we cleaned up the minutia of what goes in a media guide . . .