Via Spartan Tailgate, naturally.

I still have a zillion tabs open and can't get to all of them in any sort of depth so a quick tour will have to suffice.

Chengelis articles. A couple of former player quotes:

"As much as I want to say (Rodriguez) is the only one (to surpass the 20-hour rule) and to say he's the worst, I can't," said one former player, who asked to remain anonymous. "I'm sure that happens at every school. It is what it is."

This guy doesn't appear to be all-in, eh? Another one:

"Every team does that, more or less," another former Michigan player said. "Everyone knows voluntary workouts you don't have to be there, but you have to be there. A lot of guys don't even know about the rule, but everybody signed the sheets (indicating you kept to the 20-hour rule). It was never a big deal. Those sheets were signed, and that's the only paper trail there is."

If that's true and compliance has lists of their spot checks, this tempest will quickly suck itself into a teapot. All that's left is anonymous mudslinging from former players (and non-anonymous statements from Clemons), some of which have been directly refuted.

Also, long snapper Sean Griffin disputes the reports about quality control staff checking up on voluntary workouts:

He said he frequently worked with the special teams during the offseason and that an allegation in the report that Rodriguez's staff broke rules by monitoring offseason scrimmages was not true, as far as he could tell.

"When I was helping with the specialists, there was never a coach, a graduate assistant, or a quality control coach there," he said. "I wasn't sitting there writing everything down and reporting to a coach. I worked out with a few of the new guys.

Epistolary bit. Email sent to Deadspin about this post, containing this snippet:

In fact, the coach apparently admitted to one violation during the presser, saying that they send strength coaches into the weight room during offseason lifting "so they don't drop a weight on their foot." (Caring!) Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's against the rules.

http://mgoblog.com/content/jihad-second-they-dont-know-rules

non-countable time:
m. *Voluntary individual workouts,* provided these workouts are not required or supervised by coaching staff members, except that such activities may be monitored for safety purposes or conducted by the institution's strength and conditioning personnel who have department wide duties.

I know that would have taken 30 seconds of research, so I understand why you didn't have time.

Smart Football devoted a ton of time and space to the thing; as always with Smart Football it's worth a read. He pulls out a couple recent teams that were dinged for exceeding practice limits:

In 2003, limits on facility use and practice time were almost completely ignored at SDSU, and, as a result, the program was placed on two-years of probation. More recently, SDSU exceeded the time allotted by the NCAA by about 15-minutes, and therefore voluntarily curtailed its practice time by an hour, broken up in 12-minute chunks over a week.

More drastic was Ball State. The NCAA investigated Ball State, though the scope went beyond just football and into a variety of sports. The NCAA found that BSU’s softball team had “repeatedly exceeded daily and weekly practice hour limitations, failed to give student-athletes a required day off each week from athletically related activities, and conducted individual skill instruction sessions in violation of NCAA rules.” That was not all, however. The NCAA also found that BSU had allowed [27 grand in book fraud, which led to scholarship reductions].

…But it is still early: these are just reports; we have nothing definite yet. And even if some players were working out on a Sunday, that alone doesn’t seem like it would equal a “major violation.” The questions are how widespread this was and how much of it flowed from the coaches — did they encourage it?

Whole thing, read it, etc.

The calling thing. The article in question quoted an anonymous player saying that members of the quality control or strength staff called players who weren't at voluntary workouts. Violation? I don't know. It's not specifically called out in the NCAA rules I reviewed. And it shows up in this article about Colorado (irony!) and Colorado State:

Etc.: In the diaries, an anonymous journalist says "I just don't understand how an educated reporter could look at that and not even attempt to figure out the breakdown of "required" and "voluntary" activities." Genuinely Sarcastic has a comprehensive take. Rittenberg has one too. And Jon Chait murders the Free Press' editors.