It’s taken awhile, but I finally found an example of the N.C.A.A. doing right by college athletes. Here’s the catch, though: It does so by averting its eyes from the systematic violation of one of its typically awful rules.  The sport in question is hockey. It’s not a big revenue sport like football, but it is one where the players typically enroll in college with the dream of one day playing in the National Hockey League. Indeed, they often decide to attend college because they’ve been advised that it’s their best route to the pros.  And who gives them that advice? It turns out that most big-time junior hockey players have professional agents. They are not usually called agents, though. They are called advisers. And they don’t have contractual relationships; the advice is free.  In fact, their advice is often critical. By their mid-teens, good hockey players have the option of joining a Canadian junior league. Once they become eligible for the pro draft at age 19, they have to decide whether to sign with the team that drafts them or go to college. To help guide these decisions, agents often talk to the professional teams that draft their players; they also talk to college coaches.  Is there a quid pro quo? Of course. The agent dispenses this advice in the expectation that it will eventually lead to a client relationship. Although hockey, like most sports, attracts unscrupulous agents, by and large, the system works well for everyone involved. Indeed, agents are so common in hockey that any college coach who tried to ban them wouldn’t have much of a team.  A rational person might say: What a great system! It makes perfect sense to have agents advise young hockey players as they approach critical life decisions. Naturally, anything this sensible has to violate N.C.A.A. rules.  The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.  The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.  “It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.  And it’s not just hockey players who have to make important life decisions at a young age. When a baseball player gets drafted out of high school, he has a hard decision to make. Basketball players are usually eligible for the draft after one year of college; football players after three years. Yet N.C.A.A. rules force these athletes to make these major decisions without an agent at their side.  Why is hockey different? It is certainly not because the rules themselves are different for hockey players. Stacey Osburn, a spokeswoman for the N.C.A.A., said in an e-mail that the rules are the same for athletes in all sports. It is not against the rules for an athlete to talk to an agent. But when that agent contacts a professional team on behalf of a hockey player, he is violating N.C.A.A. rules. When he steers an athlete to a particular school, he is violating N.C.A.A. rules. And when his free advice is aimed at landing him a paying client, he is violating the rules.  It is only because the use of agents is so ingrained in hockey culture that the N.C.A.A. has chosen to look the other way. What it ought to do instead is adopt hockey’s system for all its athletes in all its sports, giving them the same benefit — the counsel of an experienced advocate — that hockey players have.  To do so, though, would require actually caring about the welfare of the athletes who play the games and make everyone else millions of dollars. Which is precisely why it will never happen.
If only the N.C.A.A. would let all college athletes have the benefit of an agent. It seems to work for hockey players.