NCAA regulations allow players to spend eight hours a week on mandatory workouts during the offseason. Players told the Free Press they spent two to three times that amount on required workouts, though the NCAA report released Tuesday said players more often exceeded the limit by two hours per week in most cases.
The players also said the amount of time they spent on football activities during the season exceeded the weekly limit of 20 hours and often exceeded the daily limit of four hours. They said football staff often watched seven-on-seven offseason scrimmages that are supposed to be voluntary and that only training staff are allowed to attend.
Near the end of last season, the school released embarrassing details of an internal audit that discovered Rodriguez's team failed to file forms tracking how much time players spent on football during his first season and the following offseason.
The audit looked into compliance areas for several Michigan teams, including the football and men's basketball programs. Auditors reviewed practice logs for a week during the season and a week in the offseason.
It found "a concern" that the football program failed to file monthly Countable Athletically Related Activities forms created by the school to track how much players work out and practice. The forms are a tool to comply with the NCAA rules.
The school report did not find issues of noncompliance -- a key issue for NCAA investigators -- but acknowledged the practice logs for football were not available to be reviewed when the audit was conducted. The forms since had been turned in on a timely basis, according to the school.
"My reading of the situation is we had a breakdown of communication," Brandon said Tuesday. "We found we were not being vigilant in the way those (time records) were being filled and managed."
The time record system that the football staff designed "was too cumbersome to manage" and is being changed.
