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NCAA in the Middle

October 25, 2011 by

The day there is substantial news from one of the people or organizations committed to reforming the NCAA always seems like a red letter day for the reforms and a black letter day for the NCAA. If that is the case, Monday was doubly so, as the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics questioned President Emmert at a meeting in Washington D.C. and the National Collegiate Players’ Association announced it had gathered 300 signatures on a petition for a very specific change to the NCAA in a pilot program.

Except days like this highlight the biggest obstacles for NCAA reformers: other reformers.

The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has, since 1989, pursued the mission of “ensuring that intercollegiate athletics programs operate within the educational mission of their colleges and universities.” The most recent report from the Knight Commission asks for transparent financial statements, greater focus on academics, and reducing commercialism. In the view of the Knight Commission, the continuum of ideas about college athletics looks like this:

Knight Commission <—————————> NCAA

The National Collegiate Players’ Association has, since 2001, pursued a mission of “providing the means for college athletes to voice their concerns and change NCAA rules.” The NCPA’s most recent study on cost of attendance and athletic scholarships recommended that new TV revenue flow to athletes, scholarship commitments be increased, and athletes be allowed to explore commercial opportunities. In the view of the NCPA, the continuum of ideas about college athletics looks like this:

NCPA <—————————> NCAA

But in the view of the NCAA, a view that is closer to reality, the situation really looks like this:

NCPA <———— NCAA ————> Knight Commission

The NCAA sits in between those pushing for a more professional college sports environment and those yearning for a deemphasis on competition and greater focus on academics. The two sides cannot see each other, cannot collaborate with each other, and cannot debate each other. The NCAA ends up standing in as the advocate for both sides as often as it is their opponent.

If reform is presented as a competition, battle, or zero-sum game, any victory will be a fleeting one. Once someone “beats” the NCAA (whatever that means), they have to contend with another opponent, who not only wants to unwind all the recent victories, but go even further in the opposite direction than the NCAA ever did. Not to mention this new foe will be motivated by seeing, in their eyes, an even worse version of college athletics than before.

There is a persistent myth in college athletics that it can be “fixed”. That there are some set of reforms which once enacted will solve every problem forever. This myth is embodied in the claims that major reforms to bedrock NCAA principles are uncontroversial tweaks and that only two rules or ten commandments are need to keep college athletics in line.

It is far more likely that we are entering an extended period of upheaval and change, which historically last for around 20 years in the NCAA. The first, the rise of intercollegiate athletics itself, created the NCAA. The second surrounded the academic scandals and point-shaving of the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in a dramatic showdown over the Sanity Code. And more recently the 1970s and ’80s were consumed by which initial eligibility standard to use, who would govern women’s athletics, and how to clean up rampant cheating. College athletics runs in 15–20 years cycles of change and stability. It would be noteworthy if intense debate had not come up now or in the near future.

The major difference in the current cycle is the relative influence of outside factors, including would-be reformers. The NCAA has shown that, like an extended family, it can fight amongst itself and come out stronger on the other side. Surviving a twenty-year tug of war between different vision of college athletics is something altogether different.

The better model is that the NCAA, proponents of professional college athletics, and members of the academy (roughly the three big groups) be the three legs of a stool rather than three points along a line. Without one the other two fall over, and balance is always a little tricky. And all three are connected by a single purpose. Issues like realignment, budget disparities, and student-athlete welfare are not going away anytime soon. No sense in seeking an imaginary victory in a fight that can never be won.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With:

Different Country, Same Questions

October 21, 2011 by

One of the biggest recent successes of the NCAA is that the message is finally getting across that there is no such thing as “The NCAA”. There is an organization headquartered in Indianapolis with those initials. But when it comes to how college athletics is regulated and controlled, the national office is just one part of a larger network that is populated largely by member schools but which also includes conferences and coaches associations.

Now that the NCAA has convinced many to zoom in and take a closer look at the actual structure of college athletics, the next goal for the NCAA should be to convince the public to zoom out and look at the NCAA as simply one part of an even larger system. That system, messy at its best and corrupt at its worse, is the one that takes millions of children from their first experience playing sports and eventually produces a few hundred or few thousand world class athletes.

Plans for significant NCAA reform generally make two assumptions. First, that college athletics should continue as the primary method for developing professional or Olympic athletes. And second, that the effect of changes in college athletics on youth athletics can or should be ignored. The result is that many reform plans are like engineers tasked with making a car go faster, but only by focusing on the engine, not the entire vehicle.

College athletics, as currently constructed, has a lot of advantages. It broadens the talent base. It requires athletes to make progress toward a career as a non-athlete. It funds a high level of coaching and support for many athletes through university subsidies and fan interest that is unrivaled in what is ultimately a U–23 youth league.

It has its drawbacks though. Mixing class and practice limits the amount of time athletes can train. Those large subsidies come at a time when many universities are strapped for cash. Scholastic and intercollegiate sports are almost universally tied to a system of amateurism as well.

Because the NCAA is often viewed as representative of all athletic development in the US, a lot of the failings of our development system are attributed to our peculiar attachment to high-level sports run by schools and the traditional attachment to amateurism that has come along with it. But across the pond they’re struggling with the same issues.

The Football League has agreed to adopt the Elite Player Performance Plan, which was developed by the Premier League (they are actually separate entities). The plan takes the current two designations of youth football teams (Academy and Centre of Excellence) and breaks it into four levels. Level 1 will require a budget of at least £ 2.5 million and 18 full-time staff members. In exchange for that investment, clubs have no limits on the time young players can spend in training (currently limited to 3–5 hours per week) and no limit on where players can come from (currently limited to within a 60–90 minute commute from the training ground).

That comes along with a standardized compensation system when youth players move to new clubs, with much lower initial payments and higher payments if the player becomes a productive professional for the first team.

The plan was initially met with a furious reaction from the smaller clubs, who described a parade of horribles that should sound familiar to college sports fans. Bigger clubs would gobble up all the young players, either by scouring the country for schoolboys or poaching players from the smaller clubs on the cheap. Getting passed over by a big club early would be more harmful to a youngster’s pro prospects, so the fear is agents will become prevalent for nine and ten year-olds. And a valuable source of income for some teams will go away as it will be much harder to be a feeder club, one that develops good young pros, then selling them to the richer teams.

The questions are the same in England and the US. Where should potential pros get the bulk of their playing time? Should talent be widely distributed or concentrated in a few large organizations? Is playing for a local team in meaningful games better for development that the advantages that the big boys can provide? What is the appropriate time for young athletes to start thinking about agents and contracts, salary and bonuses?

All those questions need to be asked here directly instead of through coming up with ideas about how the NCAA should operate. The NCAA is just one piece of the puzzle in the career of an elite athlete. It is time to think about that whole career and the NCAA’s place in it. Or at the very least to think about how changes to the NCAA affect the rest of that path.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , ,

Athletic Departments Under Attack

October 11, 2011 by

When the NCAA announced it was embarking on significant reform, it presented an opening for others to present their own reform ideas. When plans for reform started piling up from faculty members looking to rein in college athletics and the media and student-athlete advocates arguing for the professionalization of college athletics, it was not out of the realm of possibility that the NCAA would become the victim of its own reform movement. But a recent and disturbing trend is attacking something more basic and fundamental than the NCAA. Rather than going after the NCAA as an organism, would-be reformers are challenging the cells themselves: the athletic department.

Oddly enough, it was a student-athlete advocacy group, the National College Players Association that first lent credence to the idea:

The FBS non-revenue team expenses show that these schools spend far more than what’s necessary to field these teams. BCS schools spend an average of about $350,000 more on each non-revenue team when compared to FCS schools. FBS schools average 18 non-revenue generating teams per campus, which means they spend an average of about $6.3 million/year more than FCS schools on non-revenue generating sports. Schools often question where they would find the money to increase athletic scholarships. But to put this in perspective, if those excess expenditures were evenly divided among 85 scholarship football players and 13 scholarship basketball players, each player would receive about $64,000 without reducing any non-revenue generating players’ scholarship or their teams.

Jay Bilas asks about representation of not just athletes from revenue sports, but elite athletes from revenue sports:

Just one athlete per working group does not seem to allow the athlete much of a voice in the process, and one can reasonably question whether the actual experience of the typical “revenue-producing” athlete is fairly represented, let alone the views of the elite revenue-producing athlete.

The NCPA and Bilas nibble at the edges. Cutting back on non-scholarship expenses and ensuring that football and men’s basketball athletes with professional prospects are represented are one thing and raise serious questions about what the role of athletics should be in a university. But what Frank Deford is arguing is something else entirely:

I’m all for the wonderful intrinsic values of sport: exercise and competition and team spirit, but especially in these parlous economic times, it would make much more monetary sense to conduct minor college sports on an intramural basis. Would the universities’ educational mission be diminished any by that decision? Would good student applicants reject them for lack of league lacrosse games? Come on.

This sounds like it could have been written by one of the professors from Rutgers that had their phone service cut off, as Deford mentions. This does not:

All the worse, the current national model has it that some impoverished kid from the inner city risks concussions and obesity to play football in order to pay for the scholarship of a javelin thrower and the salary of an assistant swimming coach and the plane fare for the volleyball team.

Let’s address these ideas one by one.

No one is suggesting that athletic subsidies are not controversial and should not be approached cautiously. But for professors facing budget cuts and students going deeper into debt to while athletics keeps or increases subsidies, does it matter where the money goes? I doubt it makes the student or the instructors feel better when they are asked to do more with less if the money flows to the football program rather than the women’s basketball team.

As far student-athlete representation, it is the representation of elite athletes rather than representation of all athletes that would make a major difference. In his wildly popular and well-reviewed critique of the NCAA, Taylor Branch offered giving student-athletes a 20% vote as a change that would have wide-ranging impact on many facets of college athletics. Except last year, even if student-athletes had more votes than the Big Ten, Pac–12, and SEC combined, there was no legislative issue where that many votes would have changed the outcome and the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee’s position differed from the Legislative Council’s final vote. To get major change, that 20% vote would need to represent only the opinions of a tiny fraction of student-athletes.

When someone pitches the idea of defunding nonrevenue sports or reverting them to intramural status, it undermines their claim that they believe in the value of elite athletic competition. High-level athletics either have intrinsic and/or academic value or they do not. To suggest that the only athletes and sports deserving of investment by universities are those that can produce revenue strips athletics of any intrinsic value, just like saying the only majors a college should offer are ones that draw enough donations and research dollars to support themselves.

This is what President Mark Emmert meant when he said college athletics are not a business. Changing conferences to grow revenue might make business sense, but not if that money is used to keep the wrestling team from being cut or to fully fund scholarships for rowers. President Emmert’s comment was somewhat aspirational, as he acknowledged the frenzy of the deal seemed to be overtaking more important considerations.

Even Division I members struggle with this issue. A lot of administrative furniture is being hastily rearranged to increase the maximum value of a scholarship. This will primarily benefit athletes who are already receiving full scholarships in sports with the largest budgets. But Division I financial aid rules still require a student-athlete who is not getting already getting tuitions, fees, room, board and books to give up aid that has nothing to do with athletics because [it counts against team limits][7]. It is an issue that Division I has gone back and forth on as much as cost-of-attendance, but which occurs is under the radar since it rarely, if ever, affects football or men’s basketball. That discussion is being put on hold for now in order to provide more for revenue sport athletes.

As often as college athletics is taken to task for looking like a profit-seeking enterprise, it gets chastised just as often for not acting like a business. As the NCAA seeks to blend higher education with elite athletics that people just so happen to be [willing to pay a lot of money to watch][7], there will always be that tension.

The goal of Division I should be to constantly expand and improve athletic and educational opportunities for student-athletes. That means all student-athletes. It means not resting on the laurels of the full grant-in-aid or APR. By the same token, it means bringing more and more sports up to the same level of financial aid and support that the revenue sports enjoy. But what it absolutely does not mean is dismantling or gutting athletic departments to feed two teams.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog, Feature Tagged With: , , ,

No Good Solution to Unofficial Visit Issues

October 7, 2011 by

There’s really no need to rehash Pete Thamel’s excellent article on some of the problems caused by the unofficial visit. In the bylaws, an unofficial visit is:

An unofficial visit to a member institution by a prospective student-athlete is a visit made at the prospective student-athlete’s own expense. The provision of any expenses or entertainment valued at more than $100 by the institution or representatives of its athletics interests shall require the visit to become an official visit, except as permitted in Bylaws 13.5 and 13.7.

Official visits, those financed by the institution, do not start until a prospect starts their senior year of high school. Even then, a prospect gets five official visits and only one to each school. And in football, basketball, and baseball, an institution is limited in how many official visits it can provide each year.

Thamel’s article does not present many good solutions for solving the unofficial visit issue. One idea thrown out that is getting discussion this year is allowing official visits to begin at some time during the junior year. That might help some, cutting down on big “junior day” weekends that look a lot like official visit events and draw prospects from around the country, raising questions about how they paid for it. But with only five visits and one chance to see a school, the official visit is not the answer without significantly raising recruiting costs.

The reason the unofficial visit is such a vexing problem is that many coaches and recruits are fond of early commitments. There are a lot of coaches who are good at recruiting, but far fewer who truly enjoy it. Most would prefer to wrap up a couple classes as soon as possible so they can focus on the players who have already enrolled. Parents want the best situation or most money (in equivalency sports) for their child, so starting early gives them a leg up. Not to mention some recruits do not enjoy the process, and get it over with as soon as possible.

This gives an advantage to a recruit who has a family with means and sophistication to be proactive in the recruiting process. Until a recruit finishes their sophomore year, it is hard (within the rules) for a coach to reach out to them. Coaches can express their interest to high school or club coaches and show up regularly at the prospect’s games. But it is largely up to the prospect to call the coach and potentially visit the campus on their own dime in order to secure a scholarship offer and make a commitment.

To erase this advantage, prospects are turning to parties willing to finance an unofficial visit. That could be the institution paying under the table, the prospect’s coach, a handler, or a family friend. Sometimes it seems the prospect is almost an unwilling or unknowing participant in the visit, not realizing that their road trip with their club team is primarily a tour of schools that may or may not have paid for the opportunity.

The unofficial visit is such a hard problem to solve because both the solutions are unappealing. Deregulate the official visit sufficiently and you drag prospects out of school with alarming regularity and raise the cost of recruiting a great deal. Deregulate who can pay for visits and prospects who cannot afford their own visits are at the mercy of those willing to foot the bill. It might just be one of those rules that we have to live with and that has to give a few schools some lumps before monitoring catches up with the tricks.

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office.

About John Infante

The opinions expressed on this blog are the author’s and the author’s alone, and are not endorsed by the NCAA or any NCAA member institution or conference. This blog is not a substitute for a compliance office. If you’re a coach, do not attempt to contact the author looking for a second opinion. If you’re a parent, don’t attempt to contact the author looking for a first opinion. Compliance professionals are by their nature helpful people generally dedicated to getting to the truth. Coaches should have a bit of faith in their own, and parents should talk to one directly.

Filed Under: Bylaw Blog Tagged With: ,

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