Believe it or not, I usually defend the NCAA. In fact, just to be nice, we posted one of their ads on the home page today. So that gives me leeway to rip them now, because they have instituted this asinine blogging policy that no one can make heads or tails of. They are limiting how reporters can “live blog,” apparently to three posts per period for hockey. That’s not terrible, but it’s unnecessarily restrictive. It’s also hard to decipher what exactly constitutes a blog post.

There also seems to be some fine print in this thing they make you sign where you have to tell the NCAA the URL of the place you’re blogging, and then put an NCAA logo on that blog as a “reciprocal link.” I guess your link will appear on NCAA Blog Central. But no one can figure out if this is only for when bloggers post live in-game action, or any time.

My guess is some big media organization will eventually sue the NCAA on free speech grounds, or freedom of press, or restraint of trade or some such thing — and I think that media organization will win. Unfortunately, unless someone wants to step up to fight this one gratis, that media organization won’t be us.

So we’ll tread carefully into live blogging this weekend until we can figure this all out.

Friday, March 28th, 2008 - 5:53 pm | Commentary