SmashMouth

It has taken the NCAA forever to legitimately support its claim that its priority is supporting student-athletes.

For decades, because of an archaic, bloated rules manual filled with a lack of common sense, the organization that governs college athletics had been more concerned about schools competing on a level playing field.

That is, until the point was finally hammered home by big-budget schools that the "everybody should be the same" approach no longer applied. You can't have the same rules for schools with 100,000-seat football stadiums and athletic budgets of $100 million as you do for institutions with 30,000-seat stadiums and $20 million budgets.

It's why Power 5 conference leaders like former SEC commissioner Mike Slive and Big 10 commissioner Jim Delany worked tirelessly to push through the NCAA reforms that take effect in the 2015-16 academic year.

The obvious difference-maker is the full cost of scholarship that provides scholarship athletes with a stipend.

Yet this isn't enough for grandstanding U.S. Congressmen like John Katko of New York and Bobby Rush of Illinois.

Katko and Rush have joined Congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio to re-introduce the NCAA Accountability Act. It's a bill Dent and Beatty originally proposed in 2013 that addresses health and safety, scholarship lengths and due process for athletes. The re-introduction of the bill includes the addition of a 17-member presidential commission to examine issues.

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