NCAA Gamechangers

Surprisingly I haven't seen anything posted about these issues but the landscape of college athletics is about to be flipped upside down...this is not good news for Lamar as we stand and probably wouldn't have been much better if we had gotten a SBC invite already

 

The NCAA Division I board of directors on Thursday voted 16-2 to allow the schools in the top five conferences to write many of their own rules. The autonomy measures -- which the power conferences had all but demanded -- will permit those leagues to decide on things such as cost-of-attendance stipends and insurance benefits for players, staff sizes, recruiting rules and mandatory hours spent on individual sports.

 

http://espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=11321551

 

Also the a judge rules against the NCAA in the O'Bannon case

 

A federal judge ruled that the NCAA can't stop players from selling the rights to their names, images and likenesses, striking down NCAA regulations that prohibit players from getting anything other than scholarships and the cost of attendance at schools.

 

The injunction she issued allows players at big schools to have money generated by television contracts put into a trust fund to pay them when they leave.

 

http://espn.go.com/extra/ncaa/story?storyId=11328442&src=desktop&ex_cid=sportscenterFB

This will probably mean that this is the first step for the top 5 to separate themselves from the rest of D1 to what I've heard is being called Division IV. This would also mean schools in conferences like the SLC will not be able to move up, be absorbed by the other D1 schools or be in some kind of limbo. I hear talk here in Austin about the top 5 breaking away from the NCAA, so this might be the start.