NCAA Rules Should Benefit Athlete

The NCAA doesn’t mind if college football teams have preseason “conditioning” workouts. Just don’t let the coaches attend. Because they might cheat, you know, and start running plays and having scripted practices.

Whatever happens, don’t let the 12 or so people in every program who know these players best be around to help see to it that they are safe.

This all seems, at a time when players are dying from heatstroke and other causes in numbers much higher than ever before, that NCAA rules place a higher priority on stopping cheating than keeping players alive.

Have we heard much from the NCAA in the wake of the deaths of three college football players--Rashidi Wheeler at Northwestern, Eraste Autin of Florida and Devaughn Darling of Florida State?

It doesn’t seem like it.

We heard much more from the NCAA when some college basketball teams were going to play in a tournament at the Paris casino and hotel in Las Vegas. NCAA President Cedric Dempsey was appalled that college basketball games would be played in a building where gambling was also happening.

So now the teams will play the tournament at a Las Vegas high school and it’s OK. That the teams will fly into an airport where there are slot machines and that they most surely will be staying at hotels where there are sports books and blackjack tables passed without comment.

That’s the thing.

When you legislate for appearances and convenience, for common sense, the rules not only don’t work, they might be harmful.

When you say that coaches can’t appear at a preseason workout, you aren’t stopping the workout. You are leaving it in the hands of fewer professionals.

According to reports, trainers and weight coaches were running those Northwestern drills when Wheeler had his fatal asthma attack because coaches aren’t allowed. And according to reports from several players, Wheeler was one of four or five players who were collapsing in distress.

But if Northwestern football Coach Randy Walker had been on the field instead of at home mowing his lawn on the day Wheeler collapsed and died, had Walker seen how other players were falling, gasping for air, maybe things would have been different. Maybe Walker, together with the trainer, would have stopped things.

It is much tougher for a trainer alone to look at a situation, make the decision that a particular workout--a signature drill drawn up by his boss--was too tough or the wrong one for certain weather conditions, and stop things than it would be for a coach to do so.

And now Walker must evaluate whether to change a workout that he wasn’t allowed to even observe.

The NCAA once had rules that wouldn’t let a college pay for a plane ticket home for its scholarship athlete even if an athlete’s family member was seriously ill. A coach still can’t buy a player a meal or some clothes or help his family come watch him play in a distant tournament or bowl game.

Why?

Because the NCAA doesn’t trust its coaches and athletic directors and university presidents. We are to believe that without the NCAA’s rules, the world of college athletics would be nothing but university employees handing out bundles of money to players, running nonstop practices, handing out scholarships to anyone with a 4.2 time in the 40, SAT scores be darned.

So we have rules because there is no trust. And maybe this time someone has died because of the rule. Here’s another rule.

The NCAA hasn’t outlawed the taking of supplements such as creatine by student-athletes. But the NCAA says that college trainers and coaches can’t dispense the various pills and powders that kids take in the hopes of making themselves bigger and stronger.

No, having someone monitoring what these kids are gulping would be wrong.

Apparently, the NCAA would rather the athletes take products ordered off the Internet than given out by a trainer. At least if the trainer is giving players the supplements, the trainer can tell them of any side effects.

Is it the fault of the NCAA that three college football players have died in the last few months?

No.

But it would be nice to have heard the NCAA’s Dempsey say by now that the coaches who are often paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary a season must be in attendance at every workout, every team conditioning session. If your coaches can’t be trusted not to conduct illegal practices, then there are too many problems and there can never be enough rules.

Rather than conduct research, the NCAA would seem to prefer to ban its trainers from handing out dietary supplements. This seems as if the NCAA would rather excuse itself from consequences than make sure the student-athletes are in a safer situation. It seems the NCAA would rather say, “Not my problem” than “Let’s monitor a potential problem.”

Instead of rules, it would be nice to start having common sense.

But if you must have a rule, make it this:

To use the favorite expression of the NCAA, always rule in favor of the student-athlete. Put the player first. If that means trusting your coaches, trust them. If this means trusting your trainers, trust them. What it always means is thinking, whenever a new rule is made, “What will happen to the athlete?”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com