Hoping to fix at least some of what's wrong with his dysfunctional organization, NCAA president Mark Emmert began his two-day retreat with 54 university presidents and a few athletic directors Tuesday in Indianapolis.
Surprise, surprise -- as Gomer Pyle once exclaimed -- they took just five hours of debate to make both perfect sense and contradict themselves on the same subject: scholarships.
No wonder the NCAA is almost as screwed up as that other over-regulated, underachieving monstrosity known as the U.S. Congress.
But let me explain in detail: These supposedly bright, well-educated men and women decided to consider seriously allowing major conferences such as the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Big Ten to award not only basic athletic scholarships but also the trendy "cost of attendance" -- an add-on worth as much as $4,000 a year.
Yet on this same subject, Emmert had the gall to say of the controversial argument to pay athletes: "No one believes that's even remotely appropriate in the collegiate model."
Huh?
What is "cost of attendance" if it's not paying athletes? Could the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga pay its athletes for cost of attendance? Could Austin Peay? Could Western Carolina?
For that matter, could Toledo, or Wichita State, or Arkansas State?
The answer is no. These programs all lose money now without state funding or massive assistance from student fees. In an age when faculty salaries are being frozen and tuition raised by 10 percent or more, does the NCAA really think any mid-major in the country can tack on another $3- to $4,000 a year for "cost of attendance" on athletic grants?
Beyond that, how would this jive with Title IX? Are you going to pay the women's field hockey players the same $4,000 in "cost of attendance" that you pay your Heisman hopeful quarterback?
Yes, it would seem that a legal system crafty enough to free Casey Anthony could find a loophole in Title IX. Perhaps adding a rule that simply states, "Any athletic team that runs in the black can pay its scholarship players for cost of attendance," would suffice.
Such a clause basically would rule out every sport but football, men's basketball, the occasional women's hoops program and a few baseball programs, and reward those programs which fail to further drain public funds.
It also makes sense. And, puh-leeze, no whining from the bottom 90 percent of college athletics about how much more this would tilt the playing field in favor of the big boys.
It's tilted now. Almost straight up and down. Let's see. I can go to Alabama or Tennessee or Michigan and play in front of 100,0000 on a college football Saturday afternoon and be on national television at least 50 percent of the time ... or I can go to UTC and hope more than 10,000 show up and that at least of half of them are paying as much attention to me as they are checking big-boy scores on their iPhones.
The reality is, scholarship limits already level the playing fields about as much as they can be leveled. There are only so many big-boy scholarships out there, and that's not going to change whether you add on cost of attendance or not.
Oddly enough, the two conference commissioners pushing this concept the most -- the SEC's Mike Slive and Big Ten czar Jim Delany -- weren't even invited to Emmert's reform retreat.
In Slive's case, that might be to protect his ears from what's expected to be discussed today -- rule-breaking and academic standards -- something the SEC, whether fair or not, is routinely beaten up for in national debates.
But ask yourself this: Why would the NCAA allow certain high-profile conferences an option to pay cost of attendance? The super powers can't attract better athletes than they do now, and an extra $4,000 a year isn't going to keep those athletes from jumping to the pros for millions.
It could, however, keep major conferences from abandoning the NCAA altogether and taking their filthy-rich TV contracts with them, which would leave the NCAA about as cash-strapped as the U.S. government.
And were that to happen, Standard and Poor's -- assuming they paid attention to such things -- would instantly downgrade the NCAA's credit rating far, far below AA-plus.
Perhaps that's why Emmert also said of an expected vote on the "cost of attendance" legislation, "We're talking about a matter of months and weeks, not years."
OK, so maybe the NCAA's not so much like Congress after all.