Colorado’s president created headlines last week when she announced a new set of recruiting standards purported to be the nation’s toughest.

I even saw this headline: “Colorado will be at competitive disadvantage.”

A competitive disadvantage for what?

Can’t get that cornerback that loves keggers?

No shot at a tailback without a lap dance?

Can’t close any parties out by 1 a.m.?

Curfews and observance of local law hardly seem like too much to ask of any NCAA program’s recruiting practices, but then college athletics have been above the law for a long time now.

Not just at Colorado, either. The rape charges in Boulder obviously are the greater concern, but the scandal is forcing colleges all over the country to look at guidelines in place to see what they might be doing wrong.

You wouldn’t think it’d be difficult to figure out. A kid is interested in a university, he takes a weekend to check it out.

Meet some students and staff. Check out the campus. Go to a game. Maybe even visit the department in your potential major.

But that’s just me. Never figured on going off to investigate the gateway to my future and end up calling mom and dad from the pokey.

Of course, I didn’t run a 4.3 40, either. Makes a lot of difference, apparently.

Until Elizabeth Hoffman came up with her guidelines at Colorado last week, no one thought anything of athletes entertaining teenagers at strip clubs or bars and plying them with booze.

Nothing against it in the player handbook, anyway. And what are the chances that coaches didn’t know what was going on? After a coach turns a recruit over to one of his players, you have to figure that at some point during the weekend he’s going to ask, “How’d it go?”

Great, coach, until we ran out of one dollar bills.

Finally, an administrator took a stand. Among her other recommendations, Hoffman said there would be no visits during football season; visits would be cut from two days to one; no more athletes acting as hosts; exit interviews of each recruit; and an 11 p.m. curfew instead of 1 a.m.

Does this sound excessive to you?

Charles Johnson doesn’t like it. The former Colorado player said he didn’t like the implication that the rest of the student body needed to be protected from athletes.

Hey, Charles: Players need to be protected from themselves. Coaches shouldn’t be turning teenage recruits over to any players, not for anything more than an hour or two.

Steve Spurrier says that on-campus visits are just excuses for kids to party and should be reduced from the maximum of five to four, even three.

As it turns out, the NCAA already is considering doing just that. Cutting the length of the visit from 48 hours to 24 is another possibility, as well as a list of recommendations where recruits can go once on campus.

Should these recommendations come up for an NCAA vote, any opposition to the spirit of them by a coach, athletic director or president is inexcusable.

Ever wonder why so many freshman athletes get in legal trouble these days?

Do you suppose the environment encountered on a recruiting visit might encourage bad behavior?

You can’t expect a kid to behave himself later when you’ve told him the first time he’s on campus that he can do no wrong.