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I'm not sure which could be considered more frustrating. That the Virginia athletic department's compliance wing could reach this kind of conclusion; or that they are probably right.

Al Groh, being an ex-NFL coach, likes to hand out game balls after each game. A fairly popular football tradition that can be found down to the high school level. When the UVA compliance department heard about the handing out of game balls, they decided that it must stop.

"It's not specifically in the rule book that you can't give out a game ball," UVa compliance director Steve Flippen said, "but there are a lot more interpretations than there are rules and that's one of the interpretations of the extra-benefits rule.

"At the end of the year, if a team had a player of the year and awarded him a game ball, that would be OK, but not on a game-by-game basis."

That's right, the seemingly innocuous tradition of giving a player a game ball after a game is an extra-benefit under the interpretation of NCAA rules that cannot be tolerated. Waiting until the end of the year, however, is fine.

So not only did Virginia football stop handing out game balls, they had to take back all the balls already handed out this year. That game ball handed out for beating Duke. Nope. Give it back. There's value to that.