We can all probably agree the NCAA is among the most hypocritical, overly regulated and insanely silly regulating bodies known to man.

For example, you could not give a Wisconsin-Milwaukee soccer player a ride were he or she trudging across Downer in a snowstorm or a hungry Marquette swimmer a couple of bucks for a sandwich.

Football and basketball coaches earn millions while some of their players, without whom the massive revenue steams would not be possible, go back to a ratty apartment after a game to make a bowl of soup on a hotplate.

Enormous State U. flaunts the rules and skates while the NCAA cracks down on William & Mary, which graduates 95 percent of its student-athletes and produces Rhodes Scholars and Phi Beta Kappas, because it has a couple of feathers in its logo. But when it comes to the ban passed Thursday on text messaging for recruiting, give it up to the NCAA. Finally, it has an idea worth endorsing.

“It’s just another agenda-driven proposition that doesn’t make any sense,” Marquette’s Tom Crean told the Journal Sentinel. “It’s really an insult, I think, to everybody involved – coaches, families and recruits. If you choose not to answer your text, don’t answer it.”

An insult? Come on. The only insult here is the gross invasion of privacy from a coach with nothing better to do than bombard some poor kid with hundreds of text messages a month. You would think that any rational recruit would recognize such obsessive behavior as a sure sign to run the other way.

Sure, you can choose to ignore the messages. But let’s say you have caller ID at home. You can refuse to pick up the telephone when the same detestable solicitors call every day and night, but that doesn’t make their relentless attempts to reach you any less irritating.

UWM’s recruiting coordinator, Brian Bidlingmyer, says he text messages up to 1,500 times a month?

Fifteen hundred?!

Now, not to pick on Crean or Bidlingmyer because this stuff goes on most everywhere, but you’ve got to think about it when Crean’s own wife wonders if this is addictive behavior. Beyond that, it’s reflective of our technology-obsessed society.

You’ve seen the knucklehead trying to drive with both hands on the BlackBerry. Or the high-school kids walking like zombies, eyes affixed to the cell-phone screen. And you wonder why, what with text messaging sometimes more expensive than the same phone call they make to say . . . nothing.

Not to get too philosophic here, but you also have to wonder if all this university-sanctioned text messaging is contributing to the alienation and/or dumbing down of our youth. Since the advent of video games and instant messaging, kids have been less and less inclined to speak face to face to the point that conversation is becoming a lost art. Meanwhile, the shorthand used in messaging – u r, for example, in place of you are – is eroding the language.

Lest you believe this is

generational-biased, a Bo Ryan way to do things, know that UW football coach Bret Bielema, too young to even remember Pong, is on board with the ban.

Shelving text messaging won’t solve all the problems inherent in college sports, but it is the right thing to do because it will benefit the kids. When was the last time the NCAA passed that kind of legislation?

You are free to disagree and send a text message, but chances are I will ignore it.