NCAA Bans Teams From Using Rivals, Other Paywall Recruiting Sites

So here’s a fun Friday-afternoon hullabaloo breaking all over the Twitters, for those of you interested in the media covering itself: According to John Infante, the NCAA’s official compliance blogger, schools under NCAA rule will no longer be permitted to subscribe to Rivals, which is being designated as a “scouting service,” CBS’s Bryan Fischer has a statement from the NCAA, reading thusly:

All recruiting/scouting services are held to the same legislated standard and we consider Rivals.com to be a recruiting/scouting service.At issue is sites like Rivals’ use of “video of non-scholastic competition not available to the general public,” which under the NCAA’s adorable logic makes them scouts, and not media companies, and compounding that is the news that every school that subscribes or has ever subscribed to Rivals has to report a secondary violation. So this will presumably be extended to other recruiting sites with paywalls, and that will totally fix the actual problem of the nefarious dealings of street agents, right? TOTALLY. (If it’s not entirely clear by now, we absolutely do not see what existent, actual problem with college sports this fixes.)

The consequences here will be both serious and laughable, as Charles Robinson laments the school’s loss of an insight into possible recruiting violations via booster chatter, and Andy Staples hungers for coaches who previously pooh-poohed the sites jonesing for their secret fix.