Brad Schlossman, the beat writer for the Grand Forks Herald, has an excellent post/rant on the NCAA liveblog policy.

Like I said yesterday, the NCAA will eventually lose this one, or back down. It’s completely absurd epecially when you consider that ESPN is monopolizing the NCAA games. We’ve gone back 10 years with this tournament as a result. ESPN has the TV rights to all NCAA events. It bought them as a package. But in the last few years, they didn’t have a natural home for regionals, so it would offer them up to stations around the country. Now, with ESPN-U in existence, ESPN is hoarding the games there – which would be fine, if anyone could get ESPN-U. Mainly, it’s only people with the DirecTV sports pack. If you have Comcast Cable, forget it.

Funny thing is, I’ve worked for both Comcast and ESPN in the past, and I have absolutely no love for Comcast or cable providers in general. In fact, they are pretty evil. But even if ESPN is “right” in its fight with Comcast, it doesn’t make this situation right. Bottom line is, college hockey fans can’t see the games.  This is where the NCAA needs to jump in, but it hasn’t.  Instead, it invokes live blogging policies that has scared the be-jeezus from anyone wishing to live blog.

Note, by the way, that the NCAA’s marketing people also had the audacity to try to get the college hockey web sites to post their ad on our front page. What was the NCAA offering in return? I asked whether we could put a small ad in their program, or put out flyers at the NCAA events. We were turned down. But the NCAA/ESPN still wanted us to post their ad on our front page. I didn’t do it for a week … then I decided to do it simply because it’s good information for the fans. But I might have to re-think it. I don’t like battling the NCAA – As the little guy, we can’t afford to. And I like all the people there that I deal with. But I don’t get this one.

Again, the NCAA will eventually lose. This reminds me of 1997, when the NCAA tried to say it would not credential online media sources. It was mainly targeted at college basketball web sites, but the policy didn’t discriminate — it was going to ban everyone. I wrote something for the NCAA News saying that it was silly, with the way the Web was growing, to discriminate on the basis of the source of the medium. Whether you are Web or Print, you can still be a solid media organization, or a crappy one. If you are a legit media member, that’s all that should matter.

That policy didn’t last very long, and it’s obvious today that it really doesn’t matter.

Just like when the NBA lost its case against Motorola — when the NBA tried to stop Stats Inc. from sending out live in-game scoring updates via the ticker — the NCAA will eventually lose this.

Saturday, March 29th, 2008 - 3:01 pm | Commentary