The University’s Board of Regents held an informal meeting early yesterday morning to receive an update on the NCAA’s investigation into the Michigan football program, a source familiar with the situation told The Michigan Daily.

The meeting convened at 8 a.m. yesterday morning in the conference room in University President Mary Sue Coleman’s office and lasted 90 minutes, the source said.

The NCAA investigation, which has been officially underway since October, is focused on allegations that Michigan’s football team violated NCAA regulations on the number of hours student-athletes are allowed to spend practicing and in off-season workouts.

As he left the meeting, Regent Andrew Richner (R-Grosse Pointe Park) told the Detroit Free Press to direct all questions to the University’s general counsel, Suellyn Scarnecchia.

Calls to other regents yesterday went unreturned or were met with no comment. A spokesman for Coleman told the Daily that Coleman would not comment on the meeting or the investigation.

University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald confirmed that the meeting had taken place, saying notice of the regents meeting was posted at the Fleming Administration Building yesterday. However, Fitzgerald said because it was an “informal meeting” and not a “special meeting” the topic of the meeting was not posted.

An informal meeting would mean that the regents were simply briefed about something with possible discussion, but that no action — like voting — would have occurred, Fitzgerald said. If action of that nature had taken place, the regents would have had to hold a special meeting — for which more information would have been publicly available.

Fitzgerald wrote in an e-mail to the Daily that because the meeting was informal, no minutes were taken of the meeting's activities.

"There are no minutes of informal meetings," Fitzgerald wrote in an e-mail.

When asked by reporters about the meeting at a press conference held this afternoon for National Signing Day, Michigan Football coach Rich Rodriguez said he hadn’t heard anything about it.

“No, I don't know anything about that,” he said.

Asked if he should be in closer contact with the regents regarding the investigation, Rodriguez said he knows University officials will continue to keep him informed.

"We're all interested,” he said. “They won't keep me in the dark. They'll let us know in due time."

Fitzgerald said he didn’t know whether the NCAA report had been submitted to the University.

NCAA Vice President for Enforcement David Price wrote in an Oct. 23 letter to Coleman that he hoped to finish the investigation by the end of 2009. However, the letter stated the date was a goal, not a deadline.

On Dec. 31, University spokeswoman Kelly Cunningham said University officials had not yet received an update on the investigation.

“We haven’t received word from the NCAA,” Cunningham wrote in an e-mail to the Daily at the time. “The process is moving along as anticipated.”

Allegations of misconduct by the University’s football program were first brought forth in a Detroit Free Press article published in late August. The Free Press cited multiple anonymous Michigan football players who described the team’s practice schedules as violating NCAA regulations.

Immediately after the report from the Free Press was published, University officials launched an internal investigation into the allegations. However, no updates or comments on the internal investigation have been issued since it began.

— Daily Sports Editor Nicole Auerbach contributed to this report.