Fifth-round pick Treston Decoud will not be participating in the Houston Texans’ upcoming OTAs and training sessions. The cornerback isn’t holding out, or injured, or doing anything nefarious.

Instead, the NCAA is prohibiting Decoud from participating in any more Texans activities until his class at Oregon State graduates. That’s on June 17, two days after Houston’s mandatory rookie minicamp wraps up.

It’s a rule designed to keep up the fallacy of the student-athlete in perhaps the most ironically hypocritical way possible. The point of going to college is to prepare a young person for their career and life as an independent adult. Decoud has achieved the increasingly fickle goal of gaining a lucrative career right out of college, but the NCAA is preventing him from pursuing it on an archaic technicality.

Decoud has overcome quite a bit to graduate from Oregon State. He started out at a D-II school (Chadron State) but had to leave when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. He bounced from an FCS school (Nicholls State) to a JUCO before finally getting his academic and personal life in order in Corvallis.

Surely his life experience and dedication to pursuing both his education and football dreams should mean something to the NCAA. As is typically the case with the NCAA, the organization can’t see the forest from the trees it keeps running into headlong.