You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for November 2011

MLB Agreement Big News For College Baseball

November 23, 2011 by

When the NCAA legislative process is wound into high gear, it’s natural for compliance offices to take notice. Obviously if something changes in the book we use everyday, we need to know that and be ready for it.

Major league collective bargaining negotiations would seem to have a lot less impact on college sports. But the changes made in them can have a big impact. Normally those changes are small in the grand scheme of things. A two-year age limit in the NBA is considered a footnote to a negotiation that centers on revenue splits and free agency mechanics, despite the impact is has on the NBA’s talent pipeline.

By contrast, Major League Baseball’s quick and quiet negotiations made spending on new players who are or might be in college a major issue. After recommended signing bonuses for players failed to curb spending on incoming talent, the union and the owners have agreed to significant penalties for teams who do not follow MLB’s slotting system.

A luxury tax threshold will be set based on a team’s recommended bonuses for the first 10 rounds of the draft. Exceeding the recommended bonuses by even 5% requires payment of a 75% tax. Penalties escalate quickly; teams exceeding the tax threshold by 15% pay a 100% fine and lose two first round draft picks.

In addition, the signing deadline was moved up a full month. Instead of being in mid-August, right before school started, it will be in mid-July, moving around based on the All Star Game.

All of this is a gigantic win for compliance professionals and the NCAA Eligibility Center. With less wiggle room allowed (and small commissions available), agents acting as advisors to players have less incentive to take a hands-on approach to negotiations, meaning fewer violations of Bylaws 12.3.2 and 12.3.2.1. The shorter negotiating window also means amateur status can be settled sooner, reducing the number of Eligibility Center investigations which stretch into the school year.

In the medium-to-long term, it should improve other aspects of the recruiting and initial eligibility process. Baseball should settle into a pattern, like the NBA did, where draft position largely dictates whether a prospect will attend college. This means prospects who are not projected high enough will need to take academics more seriously. A worldwide draft, rumored to be a possibility as soon as 2014 would push even more prospects toward college.

Whether it turns out to be a win for college baseball as a whole remains to be seen. Baseball has struggled to attract athletes, and now large amounts of money available early in an athlete’s career will no longer be available. How much? In 2011, just three teams (Pirates, Royals, and Nationals) spent more than $25 million over slot on draft picks covered by the new regulations. The top three picks received bonuses that were roughly double MLB’s recommendation. Those bonuses alone would have trigged the steepest penalties in the new draft luxury tax system.

The fear is that while more of the best baseball players will likely end up in college, fewer of the best athletes(subscription req’d) will still be playing baseball when it comes time to make the choice.

This is the part where MLB tells talented young amateur athletes – who, by the way, aren’t union members and had zero voice in these negotiations – that baseball is a lousy avenue for them to take, at least financially, and they should probably check out other sports.

Getting more of the best players does not help the game if the talent level of the entire player pool is significantly lower.

The uncertainty also comes from the NCAA’s side of the equation, since no sport is as greatly impacted by the Presidential Retreat reforms as much as baseball. The $2,000 miscellaneous expense allowance may change how coaches distribute their 11.7 scholarships. Length of scholarships will be a key concern, especially for parents of top pitchers. And the new academic requirements will have a noticeable effect in baseball, which has many junior college transfers and has struggled with below average APR scores.

College baseball is just starting to hit its stride as a potential revenue sport. As a spring sport with lots of games, it fills a huge programming need for conference or institutional TV networks. The Division I Baseball Tournament is reported to turn a profit for the NCAA. Attendance is up as well. Despite the struggles, most notably the geographic divide of Southern and Western haves vs. Northern have-nots, the sport is as healthy as any in college athletics. Whether these new changes, the second round to hit baseball in four years fuel more growth or hit the brakes remains to be seen.

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: , ,

Should College Football Be Year-Round?

November 20, 2011 by

Concussions in football are reaching a critical stage. Players, especially in college football, are getting bigger and faster at a rate that helmet technology seems unable to keep up with. Force equals mass times acceleration. Get something big enough moving fast enough and run it into a person, and you generate more force that we can disperse and shield someone’s head from.

Now though, a new problem is coming up. A study has raised the potential that football is becoming so violent that you do not need to suffer a concussion to experience the long term effects:

The scans of the injured player showed as much damage as his teammates who endured routine levels of contact, suggesting to Bazarian and Zhong that extreme hits that made athletes’ vision foggy and eyes starry – telltale signs of concussions – weren’t necessary to cause damage to their brains. Instead, it suggested the hits players endured play-to-play and week-to-week could accumulate and affect the brain’s health. Imagine linemen colliding after each snap, a running back getting bumped while powering through a hole, or linebackers finishing off a play. Those plays – the bedrock of game action – could be adversely affecting a player’s health over time, the results suggested.

The science here is just getting started, but if this research is confirmed and reveals a widespread problem, there would need to be a fundamental change in how football is organized. Rules to prevent head-to-head collisions are of limited value if big hits are only part of the problem. One option would be to remove routine contact from football, but at that point it would be a different sport.

Instead, the challenge should be to look for ways to mitigate this damage caused by regular jostling. One common sense idea would be more rest in between games. But to have more rest, you need either fewer games or a longer season. A slightly longer season would yield another bye week or two, but what if the idea of a football season played in the fall was thrown out in favor of one played over the entire academic year?

A season played over the entire academic year would also mean changing practice limits. 20 hours of athletic activity over six days a week would be quite the grind over an entire academic year. The limits would have to be somewhere between the in-season limits and the offseason limits, something along the lines of 15 hours per week, maximum of 4 hours per day, and two required off days per week. Hopefully a longer season also reduces the pressure on student-athletes to engage in voluntary activity, which adds on another 20 hours for the average FBS student-athlete.

A competition schedule might have teams playing every other week, with the occasional game on back-to-back weeks and/or two weeks off (so half of the teams aren’t one schedule and half on the other). Even with a playoff that adds games beyond the current maximum of 14, there would be periods of extended rest.

A number of ancillary benefits are possible as well. A steady practice schedule that includes fewer hours per week of athletic commitments could help academics. A longer season frees up television slots on the weekend, reducing the number of midweek games. With games every other week, coaches might have better work-life balance and more time to recruit.

Tradition would definitely be thrown out the window and there’s a chance that year-round college football would not be as great a commercial success as it might seem given the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the sport. But if we’re serious about the health and welfare of student-athletes, any idea that maintains the core of the sport and reduces long-term damage needs to be explored.

These ideas are a long way off though. First more study is needed to confirm this phenomenon and measure the extent of it. Assuming it is, the NCAA and researches should figure out a way to test different competition and practice schedules to see if it makes a difference. Perhaps a shorter season with a longer offseason is better. Or perhaps the key is to reduce cumulative damage by having longer periods between each game. And if that’s the case, the membership should be prepared to take even the radical step of playing football in the spring.

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: ,

Crime and Punishment

November 11, 2011 by

When bad things happen in athletic departments, the natural inclination is that the NCAA will step in. The NCAA legislates standards for athletic departments and regulates compliance with those standards. When anything goes wrong, either in athletic facilities or with the people involved in college athletics, the first look is often to Indianapolis for the NCAA’s response.

That instinct can be wrong in some cases. The NCAA is an organization based on athletics and education. What the NCAA can do is thus limited. The NCAA can only enforce the bylaws that its members make. As a private organization rather than part of the government, the NCAA’s powers are also limited. And there is the issue of what rules are appropriate for the NCAA to be overseeing.

Sometimes real crimes intersect with NCAA rules. The ability of the NCAA to punish an athletic department for criminal activity that occurs within the athletic department is tied directly to whether NCAA bylaws were violated as part of the crime. But there is a role for the NCAA to have consequences for criminal activity that occurs within an athletic department, and two changes in particular would provide the organization with the necessary tools.

NCAA as Accomplice

Very generally, the membership could make it an NCAA violation for the people NCAA rules cover (athletic department and university employees, student-athletes, boosters, etc.) to use college athletics in the commission of a crime. A simplistic example would be a coach who goes on recruiting trips abroad to bring drugs into the country. The recruiting trips might be permissible, but the activity surrounding the trips is illegal.

The NCAA would need to piggy back on the criminal investigation. But the facts that are proven with the power and processes of a government investigation might show that college athletics became an unwitting accomplice to the crime. At that point, the NCAA has an interest in punishing people and organizations who abuse college athletics without breaking any of the NCAA’s rules.

Clery Act Violations

Campus safety is regulated by the Clery Act, which is actually a section of Title IX. The Clery Act requires that colleges and universities who receive federal funding must compile and report accurate statistics regarding crimes that occur on- or near campus or involving students. The Clery Act also requires that institutions have policies for reporting and responding to accusations of crime on campus, with a special emphasis on sex crimes, violent crime, and hate crimes.

When the Department of Education finds a school guilty of a Clery Act violation, there are already significant penalties, including fines of up to $27,500 per violation and suspension from federal financial aid programs. A single incident can produce multiple violations, such as at Eastern Michigan University, where failure to warn students about a murder that had occurred on campus resulted in a record fine of $357,000.

Part of the NCAA’s mission is to provide for student-athlete welfare. Safety and security of student-athletes and staff is fundamental to that welfare. The membership could create a rule that requires institutions to report Clery Act violations involving the athletic department to the NCAA, which could then impose penalties. This would include failures of athletic department employees to report crimes, crimes against student-athletes, or crimes committed by student-athletes. It is not the criminal act that is being punished, rather it is the failure of the institution to respond to it and protect victims and other student-athletes.

As idyllic as college campuses may seem, they are part of the real world. Real world crimes happen on campuses and involve athletic departments. The NCAA has neither the expertise nor the authority to become another general police force. But when crimes are sufficiently intertwined with college athletics and the NCAA can use the results of investigations by the proper authorities, it makes sense to create consequences for actions that might not violate NCAA bylaws, but which make no one feel good about college athletics.

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:

Club and Division I Are a Difference in Kind, Not Degree

November 3, 2011 by

To the extent that anyone argues, without qualification, that there is not enough money to pay any athletes in college, they are wrong. Some set of schools could pay some set of athletes some amount of money above and beyond the cost of attending the school. The issue is that there is not enough money at the moment to pay even just football and men’s basketball players a significant wage and do everything else that college athletic departments currently do.

All of that other stuff has value. Coaching salaries are a typical target of pay-for-play advocates. If athletes were paid, the theory goes, coaching salaries would go down. But if they did, the best coaches might go coach somewhere else, lowering the qualify of coaching athletes receive. That is just one of many trade-offs, like whether college athletic departments should provide opportunities to a large number of athletes or compensation to a smaller group.

George Dohrmann’s pay-for-play plan then is less ground-breaking for making the numbers work than it is for making the tough choices. Fewer, smaller athletic departments in Division I would, all else being equal, free up enough revenue to provide a meaningful amount of money above the current scholarship ($12,000 in Dohrmann’s example). That comes though at the expense of many non-revenue programs.

Mainly I don’t support Dohrmann’s plan because I disagree with the trade-offs that are made. I generally believe it’s more fair and more appropriate for a university to spread resources and revenue on more athletes rather than fewer. In many ways this is the heart of the current struggle over the future of college athletics, and it is a question upon which reasonable people can differ.

But there is one flaw in Dohrmann’s plan and it comes in the treatment of club sports. Club sports are a sidebar to the article, but if you were politicking to have this plan adopted, they would be central to building support. Allowing nonrevenue teams to fall by the wayside is acceptable, the argument goes, because there is a club sports system that will pick them up. And that on a club team, athletes will receive most of the benefits they would have gotten as a Division I student-athlete.

Take these quotes in favor of the club sports model:

“We work hard and we play hard, and there is that same sense of teamwork and camaraderie.” … “We have gained a lot more life skills having had to work for everything, by not having anything handed to us. And isn’t that what college is all about?”

Those quotes come alongside claims that varsity athletes and club sport athletes are more similar then they are different. And in many ways, they are. There is often a similar time-commitment, athletes are representing the university, and many of the athletes could have been Division II, Division III or NAIA athletes, even Division I in some cases.

The tone of those quotes and the entire piece highlight the differences between club and varsity sports. That difference is explained by Jay Coakley’s power/performance and participation/pleasure models. Elements of the power and performance model are:

  • The use of strength, speed, and power to push human limits and aggressively dominate opponents in the quest for victories and championships
  • The idea that excellence is proved through competitive success and achieved through intense dedication and hard work, combined with making sacrifices, risking one’s personal well-being, and playing in pain
  • The importance of setting records, defining the body as a machine, and using technology to control and monitor the body
  • Selection systems based on physical skills and competitive success
  • Hierarchical authority structures, in which athletes are subordinate to coaches and coaches are subordinate to owners and administrators
  • Antagonism to the point that opponents are defined as enemies

By contrast, the pleasure and participation model focuses on:

  • Active participation revolving around a combination of types of connections-connections between people, between mind and body, and physical activity and the environment
  • An ethic of personal expression, enjoyment, growth, good health, and mutual concern and support for teammates and opponents
  • Empowerment (not power) created by experiencing the body as a source of pleasure and well-being
  • Inclusive participation based on an accommodation of differences in physical skills
  • Democratic decision-making structures characterized by cooperation, the sharing of power, and give-and-take relationships between coaches and athletes
  • Interpersonal support around the idea of competing with, not against, others; opponents are not enemies but those who test each other

One of these sounds like Division I athletics and one sounds like club sports. Neither is good or bad, nor is one better than the other. But they are different things, run in most universities by different departments. There are counterexamples, like BYU’s club men’s soccer team which plays in the highly competitive Premier Development League. If you ask the US Soccer Federation, they might say BYU’s club team is playing at a level higher than Division I.

So aside from the tangible loses, like the national competition, university funding, academic support, and financial aid, dropping teams to club status means asking them to embrace different values and set different goals. It is so different that it should not be considered an alternative to varsity Division I athletics. Those teams are lost. That loss can be mitigated or it can be accepted, but it cannot be explained away with club sports.

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: , ,

Copyright �© 2010-2012 NCAA �·