You don’t usually have to look hard to find NCAA hypocrisy, but the Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has uncovered a particularly funny instance of it.
Last June, Mississippi State’s director of operations Jason Ludwig, worked a free one-day camp in Los Angeles as part of the Latino Basketball Coaches Association, as he had been for nearly 10 years as a co-founder. The camp was for underprivileged kids in grades 3 through 8 and was funded by a grant from the NCAA.
The problem is the NCAA defines prospective student athletes as seventh and eighth graders, which means the assistant was illegally recruiting.
Basically, for nearly a decade the NCAA paid for Mississippi State to host a camp that was actually illegal under the NCAA’s own rules.
Now, this isn’t some huge scandal — the camp was one of 11 secondary violations Mississippi State self-reported, but it’s an amusing example of the NCAA’s bureaucracy and minutiae. There are so many rules that the organization itself can’t keep track of them all.
The Clarion-Ledger published the full list of Mississippi State’s secondary violations, which is pretty fascinating to check out. You really get a sense of just how many regulations there are in college sports and how easy it is to accidentally violate any of them by, say, having a recruit stay 51 hours instead of 48 on his official visit.
