It’s about damn time.
On Tuesday it was announced that NCAA’s legislative council approved a proposal to expand the meal allowance rule for all student-athletes in all sports.
The proposal allows Division I to provide student-athletes with unlimited meals and snacks.
A previous bylaw allowed schools to offer bagels, fruit and nuts to athletes, on top of an athlete’s three meals a day provided by the school. But in some weird interpretation that was eliminated only last year, schools couldn’t even provide cream cheese for those bagels.
In another interesting twist, only scholarship athletes got these privileges.
But with this new ruling, walk-on players will get the same kind of food privileges as scholarship athletes.
All of this comes after Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier, the most outstanding player of the men’s NCAA tournament, complained in a press conference after the Final Four that he went to bed “starving” many nights because he could not afford to buy food.
The news put forth is a big improvement on the rule and, honestly, is a step in the right direction for the NCAA, as the debate rages on about athletes getting compensated to play sports.
A person can argue that student-athletes are getting three meals a day already. That is more than some students are getting as they trudge through college life.
An athlete’s body, however, needs much more nutrition than the average college student to function on and off the field. Their metabolism runs at higher rate than most college students, because they practice and play almost every day at a high pace.
This ruling is going to get more food in athletes’ stomachs and that means that they can compete at optimal levels and be more competitive.
This could also impact an athletic program like Idaho.
Idaho athletes don’t need to worry about using their scholarship money for food that they instead need to help pay for tuition, books and a place to live. They are going to have something to eat and they won’t need to go hungry, and when that happens, they can perform better.
The proposal still needs to be approved by the NCAA Board of Directors, which meets on April 24.
We can expect this to pass for various reasons.
The NCAA is realizing that teams need these athletes to be able to compete at a high level, if they want to be successful and bring championships to the school.
Success means that the NCAA and the people who run these athletic programs are going to get more money out of this, because of teams being able to compete better.
That leads to the argument of athletes getting paid to play, but that debate is for another day.
Rick Clark can be reached at [email protected]