My first thought after clicking on this story from USA Today’s Dan Wolken: Hey, at least the NCAA isn’t making college students pay for their own passports.
With the Bahamas Bowl debuting this winter, college football will have its first international bowl game since 2010 -- the last year the International Bowl took place in Toronto. The Bahamas Bowl will pit a Conference USA team against a MAC squad Dec. 24, and a few teams from those conferences are thinking ahead and getting players passports now instead of trying to rush things later in the fall.
The NCAA, though, is picking up the tab for the passports -- $135 per person, which equates to around $11,000 for scholarship players. That’s refreshingly reasonable, not only because players don’t have to pay the cost but because these C-USA and MAC athletic departments don’t either.
The process described by Wolken in the story of getting an entire roster of scholarship players sounds like quite a headache. But trying to corral the necessary paperwork (birth certificates, etc.) in the summer sounds like a lot less of a headache than squeezing it in come November, or having to expedite the process in December.