THE RULE BOOK : Intended to Clarify, It Succeeds in Confusing : Those Most Affected by It--the Coaches--View It as Complicated and Contradictory

It is called an outmoded, complicated and inhumane rule book; 411 pages of gobbledygook. This second in a four-part series looks at the NCAA Manual. It is 411 pages of legal jargon that stumps even the most successful college coaches. They call it asinine and ambiguous, and they had trouble passing a pop quiz taken straight from the book.

Formally, it is known as the NCAA Manual. Informally, it is called everything from the bible of collegiate sports to the root of all its evil.

Simply, it is the rule book.

“I look at that damn thing, and I wonder,” basketball Coach Lou Carnesecca of St. John’s said. “Our Lord gave us Ten Commandments, and look at the trouble we have with those.”

A survey underscored what already was considered an obvious truth--the NCAA rule book is so complex that even those most affected by it cannot understand it. The NCAA, in fact, is already trying to simplify it.

Football coaches whose teams were ranked in the top 20 the week of Nov. 2 were asked to take a 10-question quiz. The questions, on recruiting and eligibility, were taken verbatim from the manual.

Eighteen of 20 coaches participated. None scored 100%. One, Don James of Washington, declined to be tested. Another, Michigan’s Bo Schembechler, could not be reached in time to take it.

Coaches answered the questions on the condition that their individual scores would not be revealed. Most missed three or four questions. Two missed five. One missed six.

One coach answered a question by saying: “I haven’t got the slightest idea.”

Another prefaced four answers by saying he was just guessing.

“There were just two or three I was fairly certain of,” Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne said.

Before starting, Oklahoma Coach Barry Switzer said: “If (the questions) deal with common sense, I’m going to flunk them because I’m going to give you common sense.”

Switzer, whose Sooners won the 1985 national championship, answered one question by saying: “Hell, I wouldn’t know. I would think it would make some sense, but I’ve never heard of that situation.”

Ohio State Coach Earle Bruce said: “I find the wording is difficult to follow. You know how I know that? Because when you call the NCAA with a question, they say they’ll have to get back to you.

“Sometimes it’s two or three weeks before they call you back with an answer. And many times they reverse themselves.

“I hope they come up with a simplified book of rules. It’s certainly called for,” he said.

They’re trying.

The NCAA has assigned a committee, headed by Wilford S. Bailey of Auburn University, to revise the manual. Bailey hopes to have the new book ready for a vote at the NCAA’s 1988 convention.

“It’s the most awesome undertaking I think any member of this committee ever experienced,” said Bailey, secretary-treasurer of the NCAA. “It’s far more demanding than any of us realized when we began.”

Included in the manual are the NCAA constitution, its bylaws, rules of order and executive regulations, enforcement procedures and a case book that lists hypothetical situations with their solutions.

It has grown from about 25 pages in 1952 to its current length, including about 100 pages of rules to cover 21 sports.

“Some of those rules are silly, inhumane and don’t make sense,” Chancellor James Wharton of Louisiana State said. “In some cases, the rules aren’t written clearly enough to understand. In other cases, they were written with something general in mind, but when they’re applied, they don’t make any sense.”

Take the case of two New Mexico State basketball players arrested in Honolulu on shoplifting charges during a Thanksgiving holiday tournament. Bail was set at $5,000 each, $500 of which would have gotten them out of jail. But because the rule book prohibits schools from lending money to athletes, the university first had to obtain an exemption from the NCAA.

The cost to the players was a night in jail.

Also, consider the plight of the Alabama football team, which was told it broke NCAA regulations by flying players on a charter to the funeral of a teammate, Willie Ryles. An NCAA source was quoted as saying: “Transportation to a funeral is not one of the permissible expenses an institution can provide a student-athlete.”

Memphis State President Thomas Carpenter said:”This sort of thing--like taking the team to a funeral--hurts the credibility of the whole operation.”

Iowa Coach Hayden Fry, a former athletic director at North Texas State, has been involved with NCAA rules committees. But even that didn’t help him get a perfect score.

“It’s just incredible how complex some of the rules are,” Fry said. “The intent is all good. I’m for it. They just have to be able to be interpreted.”

Texas A&M; Coach Jackie Sherrill even criticized the questions he got right.

“That’s asinine. . . . This is another asinine rule. . . . What an ambiguous rule. . . . We have some strange rules,” were some of his responses.

Bailey’s committee has been working for about a year on a new rule book, hoping to eliminate a lot of confusion.

Although the NCAA denies, even laughs at, suggestions that Executive Director Walter Byers or any staff member exerts undue influence on the formation of rules, there are those who suspect otherwise.

“My interpretation is that the rules governing the use of tickets by players, for example, grew out of the staff rather than the NCAA membership, and that a number of rules come out that way,” Carpenter said.

Dick Versace, who left Bradley as basketball coach during an NCAA investigation to become a Detroit Piston assistant coach, accused big schools of manipulating the rule book to make themselves bigger. Recruiting rules are becoming so strict that smaller schools won’t be able to compete for the top athletes, Versace said.

“It’s getting to the point where the champions are going to come out of 1 of 15 schools, no matter what. It used to be that a school like Bradley could go out and outwork somebody. The real Horatio Alger-type story with the happy ending. And you could really win.

“But the guys are sitting at these elite schools, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This guy is working too hard. We’ve got to get some legislation passed so we can go fishing in the summer.’ ”

Besides simplifying the bylaws section and putting all related rules together, Bailey’s committee also is going through the constitution to remove repetition and unnecessary sections.

Admitting that the revision may be no shorter than the current book, Bailey believes it still can be made more understandable.

“It’s a little too early for us to get a feel for what the total number of pages will be, but we’re absolutely convinced that if it turns out to be just as big as the old book, the membership won’t be concerned because of the . . . ease with which it can be used,” he said.

Complexity is not the only issue, however. Georgia Coach Vince Dooley understood perfectly, though others didn’t, the recruiting rule that prevented him from watching his son play in a football all-star game at the university.

The game was played at a time when in-person evaluation of high school players was not allowed, and Dooley had to watch it on television at an Atlanta hotel.

“It’s hard for the general public to understand,” he said. “It was hard for my wife to understand.

“There is no provision to allow someone or some committee to make discretionary waivers on common-sense type interpretations. I hope that would be addressed in the future, and of course my example was a case in point.

“I don’t think anybody that voted on that rule would have said it was intended to keep a father from watching his son play in an all-star game.”