THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. LET'S REDECORATE THE SUN-ROOM. The National Collegiate Athletic Association faces Congressional challenges to its not-for-profit, tax-exempt status, and bowl guarantees no longer suffice to cover the incremental costs of delivering the team, to say nothing of the band and the sugar-daddies. Sounds like an excellent time to deal with an existential threat to college athletics: male practice players for womens' basketball teams. The topic has crowded out almost all other coverage at Women's Hoops. Now Phi Beta Cons have picked up the story (via SCSU Scholars.) Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins is not impressed with the efforts.

Anyone who thinks [the guys are] automatically superior ought to go to a practice at U-Conn. or Tennessee and watch the women beat the snot out of the male scrubs in a scrimmage. Last year, Connecticut's Ann Strother gave one a busted nose.

She's also less than pleased with the folks pushing the reforms.

This brings us to the second reason why the committee's position is not funny: It reveals the broken workings of the NCAA. This is a perfectly lucid window into who runs the organization: deputy administrators from smaller schools, with a tendency toward chronic and wrongheaded attempts to legislate parity. My bet is some folks on the committee are just paranoid that male practice players might give someone an edge.

Per corollary to Munger's First Law of Time Allocation, the best way to prevent others from working on their edge is to tie them up in more meetings.

Hurry up, sailing season. (I have been schooled by collegiate sailors of both sexes, and one-design dinghies are not gender-biased.)