Billy Gillispie stirred controversy last month when he held his Midnight Madness event at Kentucky a week early, on Oct. 10. St. John’s and Illinois also began their events early.
The NCAA’s board of directors is now ending that practice because it believes it could give schools a recruiting advantage.
The emergency legislation, passed Thursday, is designed to close a loophole in a previous rule that allowed coaches to have two hours of individual instruction before the official start of the season.
We’re with Jay Bilas, who said this for my story on early Midnight Madness:
“I think when we look back, I don’t think anybody’s going to say, ‘Oh my God, look at the difference at the end of the year between Kentucky and St. John’s and the rest of the country because they got an advantage, they got a jump on things by practicing on the 10th instead of the [17th].'”
Bilas drew a parallel between Midnight Madness and those college teams which started scheduling exhibitions in Canada and overseas during the fall to get a jump on practice.
“Then everybody started doing it and the NCAA came in and wanted to close it,” Bilas said. “We’re always going to be dealing with things like this. If this is the biggest issue we’ve got, then things are pretty good.”
