The NCAA's Proposal to Reduce Time Demands on College Athletes Is Window Dressing

Two years after the National Collegiate Athletic Association passed a new governance model, in part to deal with the excessive time demands placed on big-time college athletes, the Power Five conferences have submitted a proposal to deal with those time demands.

The proposal has been a long time coming. Just six months ago, University of Oklahoma football player Ty Darlington—hand-picked to serve on the NCAA's governance committee—criticized the association's lack of action.

"I feel like this should be done already," Darlington said. "This is frustrating for us. What are we doing today that's significant? When I leave here today, what have I done to significantly impact the student-athlete experience? Nothing."

The new proposal would make some of the changes the NCAA has long promised. Among them:

● Days used for travel can no longer count as days off.

● Fourteen additional days off per year.

● Prohibited practice time moves from midnight-5 AM to 9 PM-6 AM.

● Seven-day recovery time after the season.

The Power Five commissioners have lauded the process that went into the proposal, but given how much time the process has taken, and how little the above figures to alter the true time demands on athletes—just a few days here and there—athlete advocates are not satisfied.

"The NCAA is reaching for a good face and looking like there is a way to reduce time demands in NCAA sports, and really some of these things are just built in," said National College Players Association president Ramogi Huma. "I don't see anything significant in those proposals."

While these steps figure to reduce some of the time demands on college athletes, the core of the problem has not been addressed. That's because the new proposal does nothing to curb the practice of turning "involuntary" workouts into "voluntary" workouts.

The Power Five proposal would cut down on how often coaches officially can force their athletes to practice, but Huma worries that previously involuntary workouts will be replaced not by free time, but by "voluntary" workouts that are voluntary in name only.

"The biggest time differences occur with things like voluntary workouts because they're not truly voluntary," he said. "They're arranged by the university, [attendance] is taken, the coaches know who's showing up and who's not."

Translation: If you want to play, you have to show up for voluntary workouts. So what's really changing?

For example, NCAA rules state that athletes can only participate in athletic-related activities for 20 hours per week, and schools mostly abide by those rules, out of fear of NCAA penalties. However, because of voluntary workouts (and also how schools count time under association rules), the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago found that Northwestern football players—like major college football players around the country—spend 40-50 hours per week on sports in-season, and as much as 50-60 hours per week on sports during training camp.

"If you're going to have a true vacation period, you have to prohibit voluntary workouts where the schools are able to coordinate workouts," Huma said.

Of course, there's a reason those voluntary workouts aren't going away: coaches and athletes have vastly different opinions what constitutes reasonable time demands. According to a NCAA survey, 62 percent of Football Bowl Subdivision coaches want to increase the number of allowable countable hours for athletes. Only 34 percent of players do.

The two groups are even more split on team activities that don't include practice. For instance, players are often forced to take time to show recruits around campus. Forty percent of athletes think that time should count as part of the 20 hours per week spent on sports, while only three percent of coaches do.

No matter how many activities are deemed "countable," it's clear that coaches are still going to want to have as much practice as possible—which is totally understandable, since coaches are paid serious money in order to win. In the face of new rules, they'll simply add more voluntary practices, with the tacit understanding that if athletes don't go to those voluntary practices, they won't play.

"I think there needs to be an honest assessment," Huma said. "This is big business, this is a full-time job for student athletes. It's just a PR move … this is a huge time demand, there's no getting around it, let's acknowledge that."

Huma is right: there are honest ways to deal with the fact that playing major college sports is a travel-heavy, physically exhausting, pressure-packed job. One would be to extend the length of athletic scholarships, giving players six years to get their degrees. Another would be to compensate athletes for their labor beyond the cost of those scholarships.

In the meantime, the Power Five proposal does more to save face—to prop up whatever's left of the myth that big-time college athletes are just budding young scholars who happen to be very good at sports—than it does to acknowledge or mitigate the ground-level incentives in a competitive, high-stakes industry.

The coaches make almost all of the money. They have all of the power, and every reason to exercise it. Until that changes, nothing else will. Sure, a cross-country flight to play a nationally televised game on a Tuesday night may now register as countable athletic time. That's progress, I guess. Yet so long as voluntary practice time can be anything but, both the charade and the cycle will continue.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.