Blogging about blogging

So the NCAA's new blogging regulations have been making the rounds, much to my amusement. Perhaps you'll remember last June, when a reporter from the newspaper in Louisville was thrown out of the press box during an NCAA baseball playoff game for liveblogging. The reasoning the NCAA gave was that a live account of the game would erode the position of its TV rightsholders. It's an idea that makes sense for about two seconds until you realize, no sane person would rather read a live blog than watch the game, if it were possible to do so. But some of us work for a living. And sometimes games are played at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Friday. So this is clearly foolish.

Frankly this surprises me. I dealt with the NCAA when planning to do our soccer live blog from UCD's playoff match against Cal and the people couldn't have been nicer. They even linked to our site and gave us a nice little traffic bump. Now, maybe they didn't expect anyone to come up with so much to say about a soccer match (ahem, ahem). Or maybe, I was up at the top of the stadium and most of the sports info people were on the field and it was just a long way to walk. Ultimately, this smacks of an organization carving out a silly position, reconsidering but trying to save face by coming up rules that seem momentarily reasonable but don't pass the laugh test. I also wonder, if I had done the exact same format and just posted the updates every nine minutes of game time whether I would have been "in compliance." See, silly rule.