Randy Edsall imposed a "marriage policy" last season. Supposedly for his players' benefit.

photo credit: Michael Hickey / Getty Images

The Intercollegiate dropped its latest #FOIASaxa payload this morning, a story based on thousands of pages of 2019-20 college sports team-specific rules, obtained through public records requests, from 236 different college sports programs across 52 D-I universities. You can read the full article, by Luke Cyphers and Daniel Libit, by clicking here.

The documents present a striking testament to the wide range of demands placed on college athletes — from legal-aged drinking restrictions to academic performance minimums to bodily hygiene directions to even more personal concerns. Even before those questionable COVID-19 liability waivers, college athletes were subject to all kinds of overbearing, bizarre, intrusive, discriminatory and legally dubious team pledges. In their totality, and in a number of specific examples we found, the documents start to look like orders from employers — if not some very tyrannical ones.

Among our findings:

• UConn football coach Randy Edsall imposed a “marriage rule” whereby players were required to alert him of their intentions of getting married.

• The Huskies national power men’s soccer program explicitly instructed its players not to urinate outdoors.

• A copy of Clemson’s much-discussed football team revealed that star QB Trevor Lawrence not only recently broke with team’s time-honored social media ban, but he’s been riding the line on coach Dabo Swinney’s “Hair rule” as well.

• Several instances of potentially illegal mandates by women’s sports coaches banning inter-team dating among lesbian players. (We found none, incidentally, for men’s teams.) Marlene Stollings, the recently fired head women’s basketball coach at Texas Tech, had a “visible hickey” ban, as did another currently-employed Power 5 coach.

• Lots and lots more.

We’ll have more on some of these rules here at Extra Points over the next few days. We’ll also still have two more newsletters coming this week, including one on the Pac-12’s media rights situation tomorrow morning. But we also wanted to make you aware of this big story on our sister publication.