INDIANAPOLIS -- One is speaking plain English; the other feels lost in a bureaucratic town of Babel.

To one, it is so obvious.

To the other, inscrutable.

On one side sits a group of well-intentioned people in Indianapolis, folks who make rules and standards not to be exclusionary but to encourage academic success.

On the other side sit kids in classrooms -- some in high school, fretting about being allowed to play in college, and some in college, fretting about being able to play the next semester.

And in between is a chasm wider than a 7-footer's wingspan.

How high school athletes become eligible to play Division I sports and how they stay eligible in college is not exactly in lockstep with how the NCAA would like to see either of those two tasks accomplished.

So the NCAA makes new rules and increases standards and the students and coaches question their fairness.

The latest changes in eligibility standards will apply to this fall's high school freshman class, but we won't know their full effect until 2016, when those students prepare to step foot on college campuses. They are already sending ripples through the college community because they are so drastic -- a jump in the required minimum GPA from 2.0 to 2.3 and, perhaps more challenging, a rule that requires high school athletes to complete 10 of their 16 required core courses before their senior year of high school.

There is recourse for those who can meet the old standards but not the new ones. The NCAA is calling it an academic redshirt, a sort of nuanced version of a partial-qualifier. Students may receive a scholarship and will be eligible to practice with their teams but won't be able to compete. Provided they pass nine credit hours in their first college semester, they can compete the next season as a redshirt freshman.

The intent is simple: The NCAA and its Eligibility Center no longer want to see transcripts in which athletes essentially backload the better part of their academic curriculum at the end of their high school careers.

Instead of taking courses in order, kids desperate to earn an eligibility stamp collect classwork like stamps, taking geometry before algebra and English 4 simultaneously with English 3.

Now the NCAA is demanding that high school students follow a typical pattern, in which learning is built on prerequisites.

"The real shift is to academic preparation instead of just getting eligible," said Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice president of academic and membership affairs. "This is a philosophical difference than what's out there. There's this attitude now that I'll just do all these things late in my career just to get over the eligibility mark. Well, you're still not prepared. This is a focus that says you have to be prepared."

Absolutely no one will argue that logic. Life would be a lot rosier if student-athletes arrived on campus actually ready for college.

Except for these simple questions: Will these rules effect that change? Can you legislate academic preparedness? Or will these rules merely pull out the college rug from a large percentage of athletes?

The numbers suggest the latter. According to the NCAA's research, 43.1 percent of men's basketball players, 35.2 percent of football players and 15.3 percent of all student-athletes who enrolled as freshmen in 2009-10 to play Division I sports would not have met the 2016 standards.

SEC commissioner Mike Slive addressed the NCAA's new eligibility standards at the conference's football media days in July. Kelly Lambert/US Presswire

"We do want a higher GPA, but I do think you ought to go back and take a look at what you've really done and compare it against some of the statistics," SEC commissioner Mike Slive told ESPN.com's Ivan Maisel. "Because we think [the NCAA] may have overreached in doing that.

"I think we're in the right arena; I don't know if we've got the right seat."

The NCAA disagrees. Admittedly, the numbers are staggering, but the requirements, it says, are not.

"This is what kids do," said Diane Dickman, NCAA managing director of academic and membership affairs. "You're supposed to be taking certain courses, so these expectations are normal. These are still minimum expectations, minimum levels of preparedness."

And so here we are, somewhere between academic preparedness and eligibility, and the more cynical questions dangling in between.

"No matter how high you raise the grade point average, athletes and their handlers will find nefarious ways of getting them eligible at any campus," said Gerald Gurney, a former president of the National Association for Academic Advisors for Athletics and associate athletic director for academics at Oklahoma, where he is now a professor of adult and higher education.

"There is just too much money involved to keep great athletes out of competition. [The new standards] might close access to some athletes, but what you get out of that are academically prepared students. Does that mean it will stop cheating? No. But it will stop some of the cheating. It will keep out students that do not belong in college."

Discord and confusion are nothing new here. The NCAA has increased academic standards before. People screamed, and kids adjusted.

On at least the latter, both parties can agree.

"The kids always adjust," Kansas men's basketball coach Bill Self said.

"The vast majority will do this," Dickman said.

"Every time we've made these little adjustments, people have adjusted to it," Texas men's basketball coach Rick Barnes said.

The rest, to an extent, is an old argument with a new twist.

Coaches and parents have long complained that the NCAA mandates a standard for core courses and grades despite a secondary education system that is neither standard nor equitable, yet another complaint that is supported by the numbers.

Todd Leyden, president of the NCAA Eligibility Center, recently looked at which students were deemed non-qualifiers -- those who went through the clearinghouse but were not given the OK to compete. Historically, 10 percent of prospective student-athletes from any given school district might not qualify. Looking strictly at the top 30 urban school districts, Leyden saw drastically different numbers: In New York, for example, 37 percent of the students who wanted certification were not eligible. In Philadelphia, that number was a staggering 44 percent.