Freep article on practice...PRACTICE?? (RE: investigation into M football)

this is the type of article that should have been written at the beginning of this mess. This is actually researched and attempts to survey other schools. Some "highlights" for those not inclined to read it.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association — which touts its core mission as helping athletes to be students — doesn’t have a system to enforce its own rules that limit the time athletes spend on their sports.

Schools offered a range of enforcement strategies, from Oklahoma, which says it requires athletes to sign affidavits, to Mississippi, which says it conducts and documents exit interviews to gauge how players view their coaches once their football careers end, to Notre Dame, which says it assigns a deputy athletic director to monitor football.

At Michigan State, compliance director Jennifer Smith said all four football captains and one player representative from each class sign forms that coaches turn in monthly.

While NCAA rules governing time limits are clear, athletes say they’ve often had trouble determining what is truly voluntary. For example, they say they often get conflicting signals from coaches and other athletes who may interpret coaches’ wishes. Position coaches schedule film meetings every week. That is involuntary. Yet players often study film for hours beyond what is scheduled. A coach might argue that is voluntary. A player might see it differently. It can be a matter of perception, and real or imagined pressures.

Sorting it all out, said Walt Harrison, president at Hartford and former chair of the NCAA’s executive committee, “is a tough issue.” It is not unreasonable, he said, that players might want to practice more or that coaches might “want to practice more. I’m not so naïve to believe that these young men don’t want to be football players more than anything else.”

They also talk to a former Iowa player who was convinced they worked too many hours and decided to make a diary of the workouts. Iowa never went over.

Boycotters beware - that link is not the one to the print version. Oh, the humanity!

I can't wait until that rambling rag finally bankrupts itself.

"After the Free Press reported in late August that U-M players said coaches practiced and trained them more hours than the NCAA allows, the newspaper asked 35 schools, including the entire Big Ten, to explain how they monitor coaches. Twenty-four responded." Oh, you mean the Freep didn't bother to do that BEFORE they reported their story? No. Remember, Free Press Editor Paul Anger wrote, in the Sunday edition following the August 30 story, that it had been "a month in the making." So, what happened "a month" earlier? Easy. In late July, the Compliance auditors issued their limited-release report, to the AD's office and the members of the football staff and the Compliance Services Office. In that report, the auditors found no violations, but noted that they had not been provided with CARA ("Countable Athletically Related Activity") forms from the football program. The CARA forms were a University requirment, not an NCAA rule. Naturally, once that report made it into the hands of Rosenberg, he got the idea, "Hey, if they can't document anything from before 2009, I think I'll ask some of the 2008 guys, some of whom have left, who might give me some great stuff, if they went over the number of countable athletically related activities." God, wouldn't it be great to have Rosenberg's tapes from those interviews? Anyway, it's my presumption that that's the Genesis of the original story. It doesn't take much imagination, or presumption, which is why I am so comfortable with it. In the ensuing four weeks, the Free Press didn't collect any documents, didn't do any FOIA requests, save one request from Mark Snyder to the University, asking if the football program had ever had any major or minor NCAA violations, via self-reporting or otherwise. I presume that the answer they got was, "no major violations," because Snyder then placed that fact into the August 30 story. But the important point is that the Freep guys didn't ask for any explanation from Compliance Services; they didn't interview Rodriguez; they didn't interview Barwis; they didn't ask Bill Martin or Martin's office for information. I think it is safe to say that the Free Press didn't want that information, at least not before it went to print, even though it would have been a much fairer (not to mention DIFFERENT) story if they had done so. No; what the Freep wanted to do was to attack, based on the story they had plotted immediately after getting the Audit report. They didn't want anybody in authority to respond, or even to know what they were up to. (That allowed Rosenberg to get his unwitting quotes from Je'Ron Stokes and Brandin Hawthorne, at Media Day.) I presume that some of you guys know, but others might not. The Free Press went to Rodriguez, Martin, Coleman, et al ON THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE SUNDAY PUBLICATION, to "outline the story" and ask for their comment. That's EIGHT DAYS BEFORE THE START OF THE FOOTBALL SEASON. And about 36 HOURS BEFORE PRESS-TIME. Most of you know what that time is like for the coaching staff; they are working 20-hour days then, trying to get their young team ready for the first game of the season. And then they get a phone call from the Free Press. Asking for, uh, comment. So this is the bottom line: the Free Press has done a lot of investigating since the story broke. It is all a lot of investigating that they could have done before the story, but they chose to run with what they had. I say, the Free Press deliberately laid in the weeds with its requests for documents. The Freep issued its FOIA requests for documents relating to CARA documents AFTER it published the August 30 story. Isn't it amazing, what our local media is NOT reporting? You ask any one of our local writers, local radio guys about any critical analysis (heck, just aksing good questions) of the Free Press writers, and they just run and hide. Disgraceful.

I think everyone who has an interest in this entire issue should give this article a read. I would say that it's pretty well done and covers a lot of good angles. Everyone above who is complaining about the timing of the original article and the questionable tactics about who they asked what when are dead on. There's no question in my mind that this was all released in a certain order to get maximum effect, which clearly worked. I think that's disingenuous and dishonest and overall a pretty crappy thing to do. But, this article seems well researched and relatively unbiased. It should have been printed side by side with the original investigation for a full picture of the issue.