OPINION

By Dave Curtis

updated 6:03 p.m. ET May 21, 2009

CHICAGO - May is meetings month in college football, and the drill goes like this. Conferences pay resorts and luxury hotels tens of thousands of dollars to provide buffets and meetings rooms to their coaches and administrators. Priority No. 1 for those folks this spring? Cutting costs.

"Everybody," Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez said this week, "is looking at things to save money."

Amazing, right? Another paradox in this head-shaking sport. But there's no doubting this year's mission is to trim budgets and tighten belts on campus and in the league office. The brainstorming has stretched from the routine (we'll wait a year on the new carpeting) to the radical (furloughs for football coaches), and it's likely to continue once revenue projections become clearer later this summer.

For now, the debate continues. And regardless of what shakes out of these sessions, here are a few measures that need to be implemented. Some would require NCAA legislation; others would need nothing more than handshake agreements. All would help football and budgets, both of which could use some improvement in 2009.

1. Reduce official visits from five to three. As recruits hone in on their eventual colleges, the NCAA allows them school-paid, weekend-long visits to as many as five campuses. The expenditure, which includes travel to and from campus, runs north of $100,000 for schools with large numbers of sports.

But most recruits, especially in the major sports, don't take all five visits. And many who do just want an extra weekend of free partying before they choose a campus. On the coaches' side, the order of the visits seems important; programs tend to give higher priority to recruits who use early official visits on their campuses.

"We've talked about it," Rodriguez said of his staff. "We've said, 'Let's not bring them in just to bring them in. Let's make sure they're seriously interested in us.'"

Recruits don't need five visits, and schools don't need to be on the hook for it. Three visits are plenty, and that leaves room to change the rules to four visits, an obvious compromise.

2. Minimum $1 million bowl payouts. So the bowls say they help college football and mean a lot to the fabric of the game. Put up or shut up time, guys. No school should lose money on a bowl trip, even one across a country or an ocean. These games need to fund travel for players, coaches, bands and cheerleaders; anything short of the magic million figure, and the game gets decertified. Take some of that local economy profit and push it back to the folks responsible for creating it.

3. Ride a bus for any road trip shorter than 350 miles. At most schools, this is the norm for the athletes in non-revenue sports (not football or basketball). "It's going to save us about $175,000," Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said. This would be the Ohio State that this year boasts a $115 million budget and has enough revenue to pump $26.2 million back to the rest of the university. Bet Ohio University, or Miami (Ohio), sits in a little rougher shape.

4. Limit staff sizes. An ESPN.com blog reported that more than 50 non-players appeared in a recent Michigan football team photograph. Mike Groh, an offensive coordinator last year at Virginia, is a graduate assistant at Alabama. The numbers of operations staff and recruiting assistants are multiplying, and it's becoming a big cash eater.

No program needs more than 30 full-time employees -- from the head coach to the trainers, the video guys to the secretaries -- to function. Need envelope stuffers? Get some work-study students.

5. No hotels for the home team. Most programs, especially in the larger leagues, place their teams in hotels on the eve of home games. Coaches see this as a bonding activity. Bean counters see it as foolishness. Keep the kids in their dorms when they play at home.

The NCAA won't legislate on many of these issues because they are institution-by-institution decisions. Many initiatives fall under that category, making some conferences afraid of making these adjustments because of the competitive disadvantages they might face, especially in recruiting.

But money is sparse, which means change is gonna come. And soon. These meetings, and the next few months, will determine how drastic those changes become.

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