College coaches are occasionally shameless.

OK, more than occasionally. College coaches are frequently shameless. This shamelessness is understandable -- college hoops recruiting is a constant arms race, a mix of ingrained relationships, new facilities, program prestige and a coach's ability to build friendships with players barely into their freshman year of high school.

But in the case of young recruits, shamelessness has recently crossed over into downright insanity. I'm referring specifically to the practice of offering eighth-graders college scholarships, which became a minor recruiting trend last spring thanks largely to the overzealous efforts of former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie and Florida coach Billy Donovan, both of whom extended scholarship offers to top-rated eighth graders. They weren't the only coaches doing it -- and coaches have long relied on sleazily beating each other to the punch in the earliest years of prospect scouting -- but those examples were enough to get the National Association of Basketball Coaches to come out against the practice, not that that mattered.

Now the NCAA wants to go one step further. The Recruiting and Athletics Personnel Issues Cabinet -- or RAPIC, as I've just decided to call it -- will back a proposal to prohibit making scholarship offers to recruits before July 1 in the summers between their junior and senior years in high school. Good rule? Great rule! In theory, anyway.

The rule would do several things. It would give high school kids plenty of time to make a decision, allowing them to brush away the insanity of recruitment that currently bombards most athletes at the age of 13 and 14. Families would no longer feel pressured to make decisions about their son's future four years in advance. It would also end the recruiting arms race, wherein coaches feel they need to recruit younger and younger players to keep up with their competition. All in all, it would officially and unequivocally ban the creepy practice of offering scholarships to kids who are just beginning to realize they might be good enough at basketball to one day play in college. That's wrong, and it needs to be stopped. So, hooray.

Unfortunately, theory is different from reality, and in reality, this is an incredibly difficult thing to police. If you can get a kid's family to agree to icksnay on the olarshipsay, you can still establish de facto commitments without making anything official. And there's nothing to prevent a coach from contacting recruits when they're freshmen and sophomores anyway. This doesn't solve the problem of early recruitment. It just makes it less plausible.

Then again, that might be the best the NCAA can do. It's certainly better than nothing. High school freshmen, let alone eighth graders, ought to wait a few years before getting drawn into the college recruiting insanity. If this rule makes that more likely, all the better. Even if not, it's still worth a shot.