I am tempted to write this from my Blackberry, for no other reason than it is not yet Aug. 1 and the NCAA hasn’t cut off use of my opposable thumbs.

But that would be silly and overreacting of me.

Kind of like the recent decision by the NCAA board of directors to tell all coaches that they could no longer text message recruits.

In spirit, the crackdown on texting is well intended. There is something inherently creepy about the idea of middle-aged men writing, “Wazzup?” to high schoolers 30 times a day.

And heaven knows, without limitations, some coaches would find their thumbs in slings. One coach told me he knew of a top-level athlete who received upwards of 300 text messages a day.

“We, as coaches, did this to ourselves,’’ said Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martell, who proudly has made it his mission in life to refuse to learn how to text message, email or operate a computer.

“We have to understand that. When people are playing a game across a gym and you see guys tapping in, getting them a message when that game ends, isn’t there something wrong or unusual with that? It’s not healthy. It doesn’t feel right.’’

But just as the NCAA was readying to hand down its mandate in April, Curtis Sumpter left the dais after the Big 5 banquet ended and pulled out his handy-dandy Sidekick from his pocket. The Villanova senior was checking his email.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is called a loophole.

And this one is big enough for Glen Davis to walk through.

See, when it comes to technology, the NCAA is like Wally Cleaver, patiently typing grammatically correct sentences on its keypad while everyone else is simply going with IOH TTYL (I’m outta here. Talk to you later).

In other words, it’s clueless.

Nowadays, most kids don’t leave the house without three things – their cell phone, their ipod and their Sidekick.

The last is to teenagers and 20-somethings what the Blackberry is to businessmen and coaches. Less expensive, the handheld not only sends and receives text messages, it sends and receives (drum roll, please) emails.

Finishing up practice? If your Sidekick is in the locker, so is your email. At an AAU tournament and don’t have your laptop? That’s OK. Your Sidekick has it.

When the NCAA elected to eliminate text messaging, it did nothing about emailing. An email, the NCAA decided a while back, is like snail mail and there is no limit as to how much a coach can send.

For the techno-challenged ones out there whose songs still click from the 8-track, this is what that means. If a coach has a recruit’s email address (and if he has a cell number, home number, class schedule and list of favorite snacks and movies, you can bet he has the email address), he can send a “Wazzup?” from his Blackberry via email 1, 10, 100 or 1,000 times a day and chances are, that recruit will get it instantaneously on his Sidekick.

Sounds a lot like a text message doesn’t it?

Best of all, as of Aug. 1, it’s not a violation.

“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yeah, that’s true,” said Villanova coach Jay Wright, whose staff uses text messaging but more to shore up meeting times or game times with recruits than to send arbitrary messages.

Most coaches agree that like phone calls, text messaging needs some limitations. There are too many people who, without boundaries, will sit holed up in their offices staring cross-eyed at a tiny little keypad, convinced that the 50th message that day will be the difference between the Final Four and the NIT.

But by sending down its edict like some sort of papal doctrine – thou shalt not text – without really researching the problem, the NCAA has put itself in a race it cannot win.

Really, in a technology sprint to the finish line, who do you like? The NCAA or Apple?

“This is very new and all of us, the NCAA, coaches, student-athletes, need to sit down and look into this further before making some sort of all-encompassing decision,’’ Wright said. “It’s such a new phenomenon that to right away make a rule and eliminate it doesn’t seem very responsible.’’

Especially when there are so many direct routes around it.

No, somewhere down the road, this rule will be tinkered with and an amendment will be added to the rulebook that currently outweighs the Chinese white pages.

Of corz, ICBW.