I thought the dumbest thing about the NCAA’s arcane food rules was the bagel topping nonsense.
It’s the NCAA; I should have known better.
“Not many kids growing up in Texas eat a bagel in the morning with nothing on it,” said University of Texas sports dietician Amy Culp.
It wasn’t that three meals wasn’t enough. It was that the athletes’ packed schedules often had them missing one or several of the dining hall time frames each day. The NCAA allowed one “training table” — a meal specifically geared for athletes — per day, but if a player had a class then he missed that window for the biggest meal of the day. When players missed their meals, they had to use money from their living stipend to find something on their own, which often resulted in bad decisions like fast food or pizza, like any college student would do.
The more often players had to use their own money, the less they had to do other things.
Stupid me, thinking the NCAA was aware student-athletes have to go to class. D’oh!