Acronym Finder lists 12 meanings for NCAA. Not sure if my favorite is the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, the National Council of Arab Americans or Non-Nuclear Consumables Annual Analysis.
For the record, the NCAA isn’t just American - the first Canadian university joined the association in 2009.
I did not know that.
Based on responses to “where do you live” threads, I doubt this very much. The board membership is in fact heavily concentrated in the US, though there is a strong international contingent.
While I personally prefer that people not use obscure abbreviations, in my personal opinion NCAA is sufficiently well known among the majority of our membership not to require spelling out in a Pit thread title.
Except other that “NCAA”, “OSU”, and “Jim Tressel”, there is nothing in that post to indicate it is about collegiate sports. So unless one knows that three letter acronyms with a U in them tend to be colleges (especially _SU), or recognizes the name of a coach (he’s the coach, right?) then there’s no reason to know this is a [del]calculus[/del] collegiate sports thread. Someone might wonder how American Airlines is being greedy shitstains now, or something. (What, NCAA has AA in it - oh, maybe that’s something to do with Alcoholics Anonymous. But do they have employees?
If you encounter the three main keywords in a post and don’t recognize any of them, I’d suggest just moving on to the next thread. Now you’re just the guy who wandered into the Calc 404 class from off the street and is raising his hand every time he encounters something unfamiliar (which is everything). Seriously - do you honestly think tacking “Oh and BTW - this thread is about collegiate sports” onto the end of the OP would make this hypothetical moron suddenly know what’s going on and how to participate from that point?
And they’d be idiots who could clear up a small portion of their ignorance with a very brief google search instead of raising their hand once again and derailing the discussion. (For the record, I’m not suggest that Cicero was ever that guy - the OP makes it clear he took the sliver of time it took to figure out what “NCAA” stood for.)
But it could have been a business thread, rather than a sports thread. Guy might not be an amateur sports guy, but know a little something about business practices, and be interested in a company that doesn’t pay it’s employees yet restricts their sources of income.
Look, I agree he could search those terms to see if there are any hits. But you keep making the analogy that this is a calculus 404 class or something, but it’s not. It’s a guy walking up to a small group at a party where one guy is going off on the NCAA’s business practices, and he asks what they’re talking about so he can see if he wants to participate.
If the discussion was about OPEC and didn’t know what OPEC was, I’d still suggest he go look it up. If it were about IBM, I’d tell him to go look it up. If it were the NYT or WSJ, I’d tell him to go look it up.
In this case, there are hits. A crap ton of them. If there were two hits that were relevant and they were on page 3 of the search results, I’d absolutely agree with you. But they’re not - they’re hits 1-143 of the first 15 pages of Google’s results.
I’m not arguing he can’t look it up. I’m arguing that your analogy is wrong.