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Rocky Long was a college athlete at a time when no one needed mandatory study halls or constant grade monitoring or a meeting with Professor Bow Tie to decide whether the star quarterback - or a third-string tackle - was going to succeed during the fall semester.

The mantra was simple for the jock of the late 1960s and early '70s: Pass your classes and stay eligible to play. Otherwise, be prepared to shake hands with someone from Selective Service, the organization that oversaw the draft.

Just not the NFL draft, if you know what I mean.

"It worked for our whole team, because we had those 2-S deferments," says Long, once the University of New Mexico's star quarterback and now the Lobos' head coach.

"If you dropped below a 2.0 (grade-point average) or became ineligible, if your lottery number was such, you were down taking a (military) physical."

Next stop? For members of F Troop, it often was Vietnam. And of all the motivational tricks in a coach's duffel bag, this might have been the greatest in history. You might not have liked life in a college lecture hall, but it beat the hell out of 13 months in Pleiku or Hue.

Those days are gone, of course - old-school memories for the graying and balding. Still, more than 35 years after Long ran the wishbone offense for the Lobos, college athletes continue to play on big stages and, sometimes, struggle in the classroom.

As Long enters his 29th year of college coaching, he speaks as a wise elder about the differences between now and then. The gritty, sometimes stubborn coach has more than a few flaws, but give him this: His greatest gift is his almost uncanny understanding of what makes a college kid tick - then, now, always.

That's especially apparent and important now. At 57, Long is closer to the end of his coaching career than the beginning - an entire generation older than today's Lobos. Every day, he can make more comparisons. Every day, he notes it's not as if the old days were great and this era lacks charm, or vice versa.

Things are just different, he says.

Take academics. Today, each player's grades - not just the stars' - are a coach's worry. In a rare moment of lucidity, the NCAA has decided to tie athletic scholarships to a program's graduation rates, which means an entire athletics department, not just a coaching staff, must work to quell any potential academic problem.

That's vital for UNM football, which posted a respectable, though not mind-boggling, 2.59 grade-point average last spring.

On the other hand, UNM - and just about every other Division I-A school - has developed a team of academic support personnel whose mission is to make certain that progress toward a degree is happening.

Long says that during his time in college sports, universities' sophistication in making sure a kid is in good academic standing has improved. So, maybe, for the athlete of 2007, the specter of Big Brother watching is as potent - though, clearly, not as scary - as the possibility of serving in Vietnam.

Long says that with every change comes, yup, more change. It's true with coaches, with players, with parents.

"I've been coaching in college for 29 years. For the first 20, other than saying hi or shaking hands I never talked to a parent," he says. "It might be becoming a head coach, and I didn't know parents were talking to head coaches. But in the last five years, I have meetings and talk to parents all the time."

Is that good or bad?

"Depends," Long says with a smile, "on the parents' attitude. I mean, I think that because they're so involved in their young man's life, that it's my responsibility to communicate with parents so that there's a mutual understanding. But there are some parents that will try to influence decisions. That doesn't work at this level."

Long pauses a beat and then gets upbeat again.

"But," he adds brightly, "most of them don't."

It's all about perspective. Yes, the good ol' days were good. But maybe these are the good ol' days, too.