The NCAA HAS restricted blogging before. Why? Because they grant blog/live result dissemination rights to specific organizations who either pay for it or have other deals to grant exclusivity.
With basketball, I don't believe it was enforced, mostly because it's such a huge event, with such a huge amount of media covering it, that it would've been damn near impossible to do anything about it.
CSTV owns a lot of these rights through their relationship with CBS and TV rights. Others go to niche sites that provide live scoring, like in the case of wrestling or rowing.
You have to realize this - chances are, the game is on radio and TV. That's $$ for the NCAA and the host institution via sale of rights. If you're a commercial station, and you want to broadcast an NCAA game on the radio, you need to purchase those rights. But also, you've got live stats, generally provided by the institution. Those features generally include running commentary, so OF COURSE you want people looking at that (and pumping ad revenue to you) rather than the newspaper's blog. It's competition - schools and the NCAA are media outlets in and of themselves. Every university has its own site that generates a non-trivial amount of revenue (in some cases, a significant amount), and schools are damn well going to do what they need to do to maximize that revenue and pour it back into its programs.
Nobody's pockets are getting lined with gold here. Nobody at the NCAA is getting fat bonuses because bloggers aren't blogging, and people working at the universities sure as hell aren't banking anything off it. These are all non-profit organizations we're talking about here. Schools' sports information departments have been providing statistics, stories, photos, and anything else you can think of for decades to media outlets, for free. A lot of local papers don't even send reporters to cover their smaller colleges anymore, they just write stories based on those press releases.
As I said above, bowl games are NOT NCAA events; blogging would be at the discretion of the individual bowl. The Kentucky Derby is obviously not one either; regular-season collegiate contests don't count either (so if you're a newspaper reporter and want to blog UNC-Duke basketball, and the home school allows it, knock yourself out).
The no-blogging terms are no secret. They're on the back of most NCAA credentials; the others direct credential-holders to the NCAA's terms on its web site. I'm going to guess the wording is on baseball credentials, too.
I hope the NCAA does change its policy, because it ultimately hurts the schools most of all. But for now, there isn't much anybody can do to make them change. It's their party, and they'll invite whoever they please.
The back of one of my NCAA event credentials (irrelevant bits taken out):
"All media entities (including message boards and blogs) shall not publicly display any Representations, including but not limited to audio descriptions, written descriptions, game logs, or play-by-play summaries of in-game action until after the completion of that competition or corresponding session that is relative to a particular championship. In-game updates on score and time remaining in competition may be publicly displayed by any media entity whether credentialed or not.
...
Acceptance of this credential constitutes agreement by the bearer and his or her organization to abide by the foregoing conditions."
I'm a devout/. reader and also a sports information director at a major university (you've heard of it). My job puts me between the press and the teams - I run our web site, keep statistics, run press conferences, etc. That means I deal with this crap, and the NCAA's retarded rights issues, every day. I'm sure this isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.
But here's the thing with this story.
Whether or not someone can blog an event depends on some things. If it's an NCAA event (as this game was), it's the NCAA's call. As far as I know, the NCAA prohibits blogging at all of its championship events, including the College World Series and the Superregionals. It sucks, because even I as an institutional representative can't blog about my team, but as several other posters have said, there are a lot of rights and a lot of cash floating out there, between TV and radio, as well as livestats on the web and the ad revenues it generates. Monetarily, the NCAA is doing itself a favor, as well as the institutions, by restricting this.
Louisville WAS NOT restricting the blogging - the NCAA was. The blogger may have gotten away with it at the basketball, probably because that event is so huge and unwieldy from a media standpoint they couldn't track him down/know he was doing it, and the Orange Bowl isn't an NCAA event.
Most institutions don't care. I don't care. Hell, I WANT people blogging my school because it means we're getting that much more exposure. 17 year-olds aren't reading about us in the newspaper - they're reading blogs, and they're going to hear about us that way. I blog my own events during the regular season, but unfortunately, once its NCAA time, it goes out the window.
And don't do the whole "it's a state-funded school" thing - 90% of these schools don't see a dime of state money for athletics. Their athletic depts. are set up as corporations that generate their own revenue and are mostly driven by student tuition activities fees, football, men's basketball and corporate and private donors.
So, in conclusion, the NCAA is perfectly within their rights to restrict this, even though it's Evil and all that.
Also, to the earlier poster who said that ESPN, CBS, etc. pay to get their live statistic game feeds - not true. Most all of the scores and stats you see on ESPN and CBS come directly from the institutions themselves. For example, if I'm the statistician for a football game, we send a live stat XML feed to our web provider, and it also gets FTP'd straight to ESPN. For schools that use the CSTV service, it goes to CBS Sportsline (which owns CSTV). For games not feeding stats like that, there are a few companies that will actually call the press row line (or, if they feel like being a pain in my ass, my cell phone) and ask for the score, high scorers, etc. ESPN owns the largest of these, SportsTicker.
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With basketball, I don't believe it was enforced, mostly because it's such a huge event, with such a huge amount of media covering it, that it would've been damn near impossible to do anything about it.
CSTV owns a lot of these rights through their relationship with CBS and TV rights. Others go to niche sites that provide live scoring, like in the case of wrestling or rowing.
You have to realize this - chances are, the game is on radio and TV. That's $$ for the NCAA and the host institution via sale of rights. If you're a commercial station, and you want to broadcast an NCAA game on the radio, you need to purchase those rights. But also, you've got live stats, generally provided by the institution. Those features generally include running commentary, so OF COURSE you want people looking at that (and pumping ad revenue to you) rather than the newspaper's blog. It's competition - schools and the NCAA are media outlets in and of themselves. Every university has its own site that generates a non-trivial amount of revenue (in some cases, a significant amount), and schools are damn well going to do what they need to do to maximize that revenue and pour it back into its programs.
Nobody's pockets are getting lined with gold here. Nobody at the NCAA is getting fat bonuses because bloggers aren't blogging, and people working at the universities sure as hell aren't banking anything off it. These are all non-profit organizations we're talking about here. Schools' sports information departments have been providing statistics, stories, photos, and anything else you can think of for decades to media outlets, for free. A lot of local papers don't even send reporters to cover their smaller colleges anymore, they just write stories based on those press releases.
As I said above, bowl games are NOT NCAA events; blogging would be at the discretion of the individual bowl. The Kentucky Derby is obviously not one either; regular-season collegiate contests don't count either (so if you're a newspaper reporter and want to blog UNC-Duke basketball, and the home school allows it, knock yourself out).
The no-blogging terms are no secret. They're on the back of most NCAA credentials; the others direct credential-holders to the NCAA's terms on its web site. I'm going to guess the wording is on baseball credentials, too.
I hope the NCAA does change its policy, because it ultimately hurts the schools most of all. But for now, there isn't much anybody can do to make them change. It's their party, and they'll invite whoever they please.
"All media entities (including message boards and blogs) shall not publicly display any Representations, including but not limited to audio descriptions, written descriptions, game logs, or play-by-play summaries of in-game action until after the completion of that competition or corresponding session that is relative to a particular championship. In-game updates on score and time remaining in competition may be publicly displayed by any media entity whether credentialed or not.
Acceptance of this credential constitutes agreement by the bearer and his or her organization to abide by the foregoing conditions."
But here's the thing with this story.
Whether or not someone can blog an event depends on some things. If it's an NCAA event (as this game was), it's the NCAA's call. As far as I know, the NCAA prohibits blogging at all of its championship events, including the College World Series and the Superregionals. It sucks, because even I as an institutional representative can't blog about my team, but as several other posters have said, there are a lot of rights and a lot of cash floating out there, between TV and radio, as well as livestats on the web and the ad revenues it generates. Monetarily, the NCAA is doing itself a favor, as well as the institutions, by restricting this.
Louisville WAS NOT restricting the blogging - the NCAA was. The blogger may have gotten away with it at the basketball, probably because that event is so huge and unwieldy from a media standpoint they couldn't track him down/know he was doing it, and the Orange Bowl isn't an NCAA event.
Most institutions don't care. I don't care. Hell, I WANT people blogging my school because it means we're getting that much more exposure. 17 year-olds aren't reading about us in the newspaper - they're reading blogs, and they're going to hear about us that way. I blog my own events during the regular season, but unfortunately, once its NCAA time, it goes out the window.
And don't do the whole "it's a state-funded school" thing - 90% of these schools don't see a dime of state money for athletics. Their athletic depts. are set up as corporations that generate their own revenue and are mostly driven by student tuition activities fees, football, men's basketball and corporate and private donors.
So, in conclusion, the NCAA is perfectly within their rights to restrict this, even though it's Evil and all that.
Also, to the earlier poster who said that ESPN, CBS, etc. pay to get their live statistic game feeds - not true. Most all of the scores and stats you see on ESPN and CBS come directly from the institutions themselves. For example, if I'm the statistician for a football game, we send a live stat XML feed to our web provider, and it also gets FTP'd straight to ESPN. For schools that use the CSTV service, it goes to CBS Sportsline (which owns CSTV). For games not feeding stats like that, there are a few companies that will actually call the press row line (or, if they feel like being a pain in my ass, my cell phone) and ask for the score, high scorers, etc. ESPN owns the largest of these, SportsTicker.