TALLAHASSEE, AP–Bobby Bowden appealed to the NCAA to include wins from his past before. He may have to do it again.

Florida State will appeal the NCAA ruling in an academic fraud case including the vacating of 14 wins, but should the University lose the appeal Bowden will likely try a new tack. Rather than refuse to honor the NCAA, Florida State will instead lobby for the inclusion of several victories he participated in as a major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Bowden, seen here with Joe Paterno in happier times (i.e., the 1930s)

“Bowden wants that record badly enough to go that far,” said one administration source close to the situation who spoke to the AP anonymously. (more…)

Put them away when the recruits are around, and just to be sure you don’t get a secondary violation from the NCAA or have to report one yourself, obey the following rules to avoid “Game simulations” of any sort whatsoever.

–Empty stands. (University of Colorado and others as judged acceptable under this term. Hey, don’t blame us: blame Google’s first image result for “empty stands college football.” )

–Introduce football recruits over loudspeaker…at student parking office administration building.

–Refrain from saying the word “Football” in connection with anything. Instead, make references to “American strategy dashing,” “Collisionball,” “Smashypants,” “Oblate Spheroid Chase,” “Directed Tag,” “Concussery,” “Interesting Rugby,” and “Freedom Crushball.”

–Scoring touchdowns (Syracuse, Auburn, and Mississippi State Universities excepted from this by rule.)

–The presence of cheerleaders in uniform at any event, who must by rule be out of their uniforms. (And not like that, you sad, sad person you.)

–Screaming, incoherent drunks yelling at recruits full bore. (Only permitted if screaming, incoherent drunks are in fact boosters, and they usually are.)

The yearly tweaking of the rules is now on the docket, and let us humbly propose one rule in sore need of tweakage: the transfer rule, a bit of earth-salting schools may use on recruits who transfer out of programs. Robert Marve received an especially poxy variant of the treatment, with Miami refusing to allow Marve to transfer to an ACC school, in-state, or even to an SEC school. Now, it’s USC transfer Vidal Hazelton’s turn for a dose:

Vidal Hazelton, the former USC wide receiver from Staten Island, has been barred from talking to any Pac-10 teams and Notre Dame in his search for a new school, the Torrance Daily Breeze reported on Thursday.

Well, transferring to Idaho is still on the table.

Hazelton’s from Staten Island, NY, so declaring West Coast verboten likely isn’t that big a deal for someone wanting to transfer closer to home. That’s not the point: Hazelton should have the right to transfer wherever he can get an offer, and USC shouldn’t be allowed to hold him once he’s made the decision to transfer. The year penalty–or some variation thereof–makes sense to discourage transfers, but restricting where a player goes after the transfer makes not using the word “chattel” very, very difficult when talking about players’ relationship with schools in the NCAA.

In sum, it is a crappy situation. (Hey, at least Florida crapped itself in an individual case, as opposed to 22 players doing it all at once on the field at home against Alabama and in Jacksonville.)

I implore you to stop. Please.

From Myles Brand’s bit in the Huffington Post on the role of profit in collegiate athletics:

Neither higher education, of which college sports is only a small part, nor intercollegiate athletics is truly capitalistic. They do not generate revenue to make a profit; they generate revenue to fulfill a purpose, to meet the mission of higher education.

From the Sports Business Journal:

The SEC’s total payout to its schools in 2007-08 was $63.6 million after the conference’s cut. TV revenue is distributed among the 12 universities and the league; each school received about $5.3 million this past fiscal year. Under the new deal, that annual number could leap to as much as $15 million per school, which is just shy of the projected average revenue Big Ten schools get from their TV deals each year.

Myles Brand: the Kofi Annan of college athletics. Please don’t shoot each other. Really. It’s quite poor form. We deplore this violence and violation of international law. Cease and desist or face sanction. No, that’s not a very polite thing to do with a tank. Heavens, are you throwing that woman into a deep-fryer? No, that’s not specifically against charter, but it’s certainly on the face a serious violation of her human rights. I fear you shall be receiving a sternly worded letter of rebuke from me, and a condemnation from the Security Council will narrowly pass, with China and Russia abstaining, of course…

Inadvertent or not, the winnowing down of D-1 football to a Premiere League begins with the APR. Columnage hyah at the SN.

Oh, and in unrelated news, Chile knows how to throw a death-party:

Either that’s a volcano and thunderstorm going off simultaneously, or we’ve just found exclusive pictures of Nick Saban’s new office. More photos here.

The NCAA released the APR today, the Academic Progress Report, the NCAA’s opportunity to seize the spotlight and do what it does best: issue press releases.

The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program (APP) is creating positive behavioral change among Division I institutions, according to new four-year data released May 6.

The multi-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) data – with four years of data collection available for the first time – show upward trends in several categories, especially from 2005-06 to 2006-07.

GET DOWN, PARTY PEOPLE! GET DOWN!

We’re still digging through the data for this year, made even more fun by the NCAA’s propensity for releasing a press release on one page, a commentary on another, a spreadsheet here, a comprehensive list hosted on a Russian Military server and only accessible via several hours of white-knuckle hackery. Fortunately, the Indy Star has them all compiled nicely for you so you can revel in the uproarious ironies of a system where the University of Florida’s football team is on par with the United States Military Academy’s team in academic performance, and where Eastern Kentucky pwnz them both.

In the meantime, the only penalties of any relevance to college football go to Kansas and Washington State, who will suffer scholarship losses due to underwhelming APR scores. NCAA, beware: Mark Mangino will have his real estate agent call you to voice his displeasure with your metrics!

Two interesting notes regarding the NCAA, your favorite curiously defined regulatory entity, bear some mention here. Both come courtesy of the good people at Miami Hawk Talk, the smartest damn mid-major board in the universe, and both make sense, which means the sun will go dark today and the man in the rabbit costume is bound to waltz into your office and start talking to you about wormholes any second now–because this is the NCAA we’re discussing.

The NCAA first has decided to pursue where the FBI has relented in the points-shaving scandal at Toledo, conducting its own investigation into the university’s handling of the Harvey “Scooter” McDougle case. McDougle, a running back, had been accused of taking money from a Detroit gambler to recruit others to shave points in football and basketball games at Toledo.

The charges against McDougle have been dropped, but the NCAA presses forward:

“We have had repeated contacts with the university … and have been working collaboratively, including a previous campus visit to interview an individual about a potential sports wagering issue that had been brought to our attention,” NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Meaning that doing this as a MAC school could get you fucking fried by the NCAA, especially on the heels of the stories of Toledo coaches taking the company card to pay for expenses during trips to Germany to go “recruiting.” In Germany. Where the only football played outside of NFL Europe involves guys named Beckenbauer, Voeller, and Ballack.

Second, the NCAA’s reconsidering its ban on text messaging and other forms of digital communication. OMG URBN IZ XCTED NCAA WUZ SO NF!!! More than thirty schools filed override complaints in regards to the ruling, meaning it will be reviewed.

Walk-ons at Colorado were charged less for training meals from the years 2000-2005, a violation of some clause in the NCAA’s 3,289 page rulebook on student conduct that will cost the University of Colorado three scholarships and two years on probation.

(Pause. Inhale. Exhale.)

There’s plenty of monkey feces to hurl at everyone here–grab an umbrella, because we’re about to make it rain. First, poop on Gary Barnett for not hiring someone to notice the little things that kill or make management of something as large as a football program, or heaps of shit on him for letting little shitbag things like this fly under his extremely underpowered mental radar without considering the potential consequences cloud his thinking.

Sooper Genious Barnett strikes from beyond the career grave.

We now, more than ever, imagine Gary Barnett as the guy who fails to claim an elephant-size chunk of income from his taxes (”Hey, I never imagined the BurnLounge account would do so well, man.”) and then just hopes that sending the auditors out to his house to dig through piles of Vitamin Shoppe receipts costs more than the money they’d recoup off the audit.

Also, piles of feces hurled to the NCAA for the deepening mess that are its illegal benefits rules. The Colorado thing is most definitely a violation under the rules, but why stop with what you’ve got? Signal to Noise is thinking fierce when he suggests in a very Modest Proposal-ish way that it doesn’t go far enough–the NCAA should codify student behavior toward athletes, because surely the status and esteem they get affords unfair benefits to them in the form of especially forceful blowjobs, entry to private parties, and ultimately airtime on ESPN, a form of advertisement whose price far exceeds the $61,000 or so Colorado spent on extra calories for walk-ons.

And if you don’t think the cash value of especially forceful blowjobs and free advertising for your football skills exceeds $61,000 dollars and isn’t a benefit other students don’t get…well, like people who don’t smoke Tarrlytons, then fuck you. In the name of logic, we won’t be satisfied until Myles Brand spends a few minutes of the day writing a code stating that if a student athlete doesn’t get teeth and also gets a push on the dirty doorbell from a fellatrix, then a regular student should, too.

We love supplements. Some of our own dietary supplements keeping us in top shape:

–Zybrowka Vodka. Drink of the gods. We could drink a half a bottle and run a 5K through the middle of Dekalb Avenue during rush hour IN the variable lane. Scratch that–“have” run a 5K through the middle of Dekalb Avenue during rush hour. With the police “pacing” us.

–Coffee. Jamaica Blue Mountain, Waffle House swill poured into a human skull straight off the crack of Mario Batali’s sweaty ass crack…whatever. Caffeine buzz GIMME GIMME GIMME.

–Japanese bar mix. Oooh, god-kissed little soy sauce-encrusted soulfuckers, we will inhale you like you were strapped to our face in a feed bag.

–Pure Protein Shakes. You only think we drink these for healthy reasons, made with the mix, ice, buffalo milk yogurt (because buffalo are hardcore and cows aren’t, bitches) and whatever fruit/meat/spare postal packaging is lying on the counter. In truth, it’s for when you’re too lazy to actually fix a meal, much less going to the trouble of chewing one.

Which one of these Swindle staples does the NCAA ban? If you threw a few steak nuggests in, the protein shake might be out of the running as something a strength coach could give to an athlete. Coffee, too, thanks to the caffeine. (Zybrowka’s out too, along with hero-…wait. What fucking genius said we couldn’t give the kids heroin anymore? Jesus, these people…)

Demon java! Our second favorite Colombian import and NCAA bugbear. The first is Shakira, you devious, devious people…

Via the Fanhouse:

“The NCAA came out with rules which say that we can’t give muscle-building products.

“If we give [the athletes] weight-gain products, there must be a limit of 30 percent protein. That means all the rest, 70 percent, is bad stuff like sugar. Really, we couldn’t give them peanut butter or milk. I’ve never understood that rule.”

Again, when faced with the hydra of writing coherent policy, the NCAA swung its dull broadsword and beheaded itself in the process. (Which means the score is hydra, 20 or so heads, you, NCAA member institution, none.) Athletes seek out supplements on their own now, usually doing so with the expertise one can expect from an untrained 18 year old doing anything complex and difficult: shoddily, haphazardly, and often purchasing supplements prohibited by the NCAA’s banned substances list.

This list includes caffeine down to trace amounts in tests, meaning coaches might not be able to give players so much as a strong cup of coffee pre-game. Deacon Jones, for one, would be appalled. The L.A. Rams legend’s pregame ritual before every game: two cups of black coffee on an empty stomach.

(Throw a donut on top of that, and that’ll make you want to skin a troop of Boy Scouts alive for so much as breathing in your direction.)

Mind your blackberries–you may be booted from the nearest sports event of choice for representing the events of the day. Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brian Bennett was ejected from the NCAA Baseball Tournament for blogging about Louisville’s eventual 20-2 victory over UConn, and his credentials might not ever be restored. The NCAA regards his blogging about the facts of the game as a de facto rebroadcast of copyrighted material, and said as much in a pregame memo.

Bennett went on anyway until the Dorkstapo found him:

I continued blogging until the bottom of the fifth inning, an NCAA representative came to my seat on press row and asked for my credential and asked me to leave. I complied.

Blogging patriot? Brian Bennett, now-rebel blogger.

Somewhere, Walter Benjamin is wandering the streets of the afterlife in a leisurely fashion and laughing to himself. Everyone in the stadium holding a Blackberry or cell phone who said as much as a peep about the game in a digital medium stands guilty of what Bennett did–relaying live information about a copyrighted event. As the Courier-Journal pointed out, the semantic triple lindy here is this: the NCAA seeks not to protect its broadcast rights, but to copyright the actual live facts of the event:

Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.

Thus…our liveblogs of games could be verboten. Along with any updates we send to friends over the internet, any discussion, a picture we snap at the game that gets posted a website with fifteen readers and .38 cents of monthly revenue…all sacrosanct property of the NCAA, or possibly ESPN, or Fox, or whomever holds the broadcast rights to the event. It’s a stance only the finest minds of the 18th century could have invented.

We didn’t care at all about the College World Series now, but just to piss off the NCAA we’ll post a live update while watching the game just to chafe their harbls right good. This is the glorious age of amateurs, and not its centripetal phase, either. Until the NCAA starts taking away cell phones at the gate, Brian Bennett or any other blogger can perform the nastiest of protests: they can buy a seat and immediately start texting away.

Unless the next step is cell phone jammers at stadiums. Don’t put it past them.