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Tip of the Iceberg

February 25, 2012 by

When it comes to the complexity of NCAA rules, the 400-odd page Division I Manual is not the problem. True, the Manual could use a little bit of work. It’s been getting face lifts and tummy tucks over the past couple of years as the NCAA staff has reorganized some bylaws. The Manual is due for a bit of major surgery next year as only the most important bylaws will be in the dead tree edition. Overnight, the size of the Manual and the frequency of phone book comparison could be halved.

But the Manual is just the start of the “NCAA rules”. When the book does not have the answers, compliance officers turn to the Legislative Services Database (commonly known as LSDBi). LSDBi has and will continue to have all 4005 current and future bylaws. But it also has 7138 interpretations of those bylaws issued by either the NCAA staff or the Legislative Review and Interpretations Committee. Some of those are archived, but even archived interps can be useful for the more specific questions.

Beyond interpretations, the NCAA also issues education columns, explanations of NCAA rules. They can offer critical insights into applying NCAA rules, periodic reminders of bylaws that require extra attention and Q&A’s to clear up confusion about bylaws and proposals. While they are not “law” in the way interpretations or bylaws are, they cannot be ignored. And there are 2269 of them.

Then comes the case law. Most people know about the 681 major infractions cases since 1953. And many people know that secondary infractions occur all the time. And all of the time means all of the time. Over 17,500 in Division I in the last five years alone (and the database doesn’t go back further).

In addition to the violations, there are waivers. In the database, waivers are divided into three different categories: initial eligibility, progress-toward-degree, and legislative release waivers. And a lot of those have been filed over the years:

  • Almost 6,000 initial eligibility waivers;
  • Close to 3,000 progress-toward-degree waivers;
  • Over 3,500 legislative relief waivers (last five years only).

The end result is that when a question is asked, there are over 40,000 places to look for an answer.

The current review by the Rules Working Group is not plastic surgery. The rule book that comes out will be the Six Million Dollar Man of rule books. But the effect is bigger than shaving pages off the rule book. Each rule that ends up on the cutting room floor could mean dozens of interps and hundreds of violations and waivers can get filed away. Then comes the really hard part: keeping things that way.

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: ,

Multi-Year Scholarships and Oversigning Limits Go Hand-In-Hand

February 16, 2012 by

To say that oversigning is a major issue in college football is incorrect. Roster management is the issue, with oversigning being just one facet of the larger controversy. It would be absurdly easy to eliminate oversigning with no improvement in student-athlete welfare.

All sports have roster management challenges. The other headcount sports have to manage relatively small scholarship limits in gigantic, full scholarship chunks. Equivalency sports have the complexity of varying amounts of aid and a renewal process that includes increases and decreases as well as renewals and nonrenewals. Men’s sports have roster maximums, women’s sports may have roster minimums. And baseball combines all of them, with NCAA limits on counters, equivalencies, roster size, and minimum scholarship amounts, plus how MLB’s liberal draft policies create uncertainty once a player is a junior.

The challenges of roster management become a controversy in football for three reasons. First and most obvious is that football garners the most attention. Second, the physical nature of the game and the large roster size make depth as important as top talent for some teams, magnifying what happens to each and every scholarship player. And third, football’s initial counter rule means the roster of incoming players comes under the same pressures as the student-athletes already on the team, during a recruiting and signing process that is becoming more popular with fans.

In responding to Tennessee head football coach Derek Dooley’s criticism of the SEC’s (and next year NCAA’s) new limit of 25 signees, David Wunderlich proposed just that: eliminate the limit on initial counters and adopt a Big Ten-style oversigning rule based on the 85 overall counter limit. That would give coaches greater flexibility by removing one limit and basing any signing limit on the more fundamental of football’s two scholarship limits. The problem is that in the current environment, the Big Ten’s rule does not scale.

If you were to ask when an athletic scholarship naturally ends, there are two correct answers. One is that scholarships end when the period of award is over, which for a long time has been a maximum of one year. But student-athletes have the opportunity to appeal any time their scholarship is reduced, non-renewed, or cancelled until they exhaust their eligibility. If a football player redshirts, graduates in four years, then walks in to quit the team, he still must be offered the opportunity to appeal the cancellation of his scholarship.

Key to the Big Ten’s oversigning limit is evaluating why scholarships are ending and judging whether schools should be able to replace that student-athlete with a new recruit. The stability and homogeneousness of the Big Ten’s membership has made this workable. Whether it remains workable in a larger conference with more fluid and diverse membership is questionable. And the idea of the NCAA running such an office sounds like a trap for the Association.

Without this evaluation, the oversigning limit is meaningless because a coach can simply clear out enough scholarships for whatever size class he wants by nonrenewing more current players before signing day. Those student-athletes might even be given the opportunity to earn back their scholarship during spring practice, creating the same situation we are trying to eliminate, where 90 current and prospective student-athletes might be competing for 85 scholarships. The only win for student-athlete welfare is that the scholarships are not renewed prior to signing day, so student-athletes could seek out a new school.

But if Proposal 2011–97 survives the ongoing override vote and multi-year scholarships become an option, the need for an evaluation of why a scholarship ended by a conference would be reduced if not eliminated. If four- or five-year agreements are the standard, then they are close enough to the end of the right to an appeal that they become more useful. If different lengths of scholarships are offered, athletes offered only one or two years of aid are on notice that their scholarship offers no guarantees beyond those couple of years.

Proposal 2010–74, the Big Ten’s failed baseball oversigning proposal, offers a guide for a potential rule. That proposal would have prevented baseball teams from oversigning by more than one equivalency spread over two individuals. But because it was designed for the limited time between MLB’s draft and signing deadline, the limit was set as written offers to prospects plus executed agreements with current student-athletes for the following year. As a result, the rule would have had little effect during the fall and part of the spring signing periods.

But with multi-year scholarships, football teams would have some agreements already executed for following years. If four-year or longer scholarships are the norm, then most agreements will already cover the next year. The rule might look something like this:

15.5.1.10.1 Executed Financial Aid Awards and Written Offers Exceeding Maximum Allowable Awards – Football.  In football, for an ensuing academic year, the combination of executed athletically related financial aid awards and outstanding written offers of athletically related financial aid (per Bylaw 15.3.2.3) to prospective student-athletes and student-athletes shall not exceed the maximum number of permissible awards (see Bylaw 15.5.6.1).

I would add the following as an additional limitation:

15.5.1.10.1.1 Cancellation of Multi-Year Agreements. An institution must count agreements that have been cancelled against the limit in Bylaw 15.5.1.10.1 until the student-athlete has exhausted or waived all appeal opportunities under Bylaw 15.3.2.4.

To clear roster space, a coach would have to find a permissible reason to cancel a scholarship during the period of award and complete the appeal process all prior to signing day. Adding in an exception if a coach grants permission to contact every Division I institution (an “unconditional release”) or pairing this oversigning limit with a transfer rule that granted a great deal of freedom to a student-athlete whose scholarship was cancelled would complicate matters, but would also discourage more roster turnover.

As much as roster management generally and oversigning in particular are seen as a numbers game, the controversy lies in individual cases. The Big Ten’s current rule does a good job of addressing the individuals potentially impacted when a school oversigns. If multi-year scholarships survive, there will be less need for conferences to examine the decisions on individual scholarships. Whether a scholarship ends prior to a student graduating or exhausting his eligibility will be based more on the scholarship he accepted or meeting the more objective requirements of the agreement.

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: ,

A $2,000 Tail Wagging a $30 Million Dog

February 13, 2012 by

Size is always relative. For example, right now Apple could be called the only big business in the technology sector. That’s not to say that Microsoft and Google are small, but when one company has a larger market capitalization that both its main competitors and almost $100 billion in the bank, the rest of the industry has so little weight to throw around they must come up with new ways to compete.

There’s a constant refrain that athletics is and/or should be big business. Except the entirety of college sports is barely as big as the NFL’s TV contracts. More importantly, an athletic department is often attached to a university with a budget that might be so much larger that athletics could be lumped in under “Miscellaneous”. Texas’ $150 million in athletics revenue looks impressive until measured against the university’s $2.2 billion operating budget.

The newest idea to provide up to $2,000 in additional financial aid to student-athletes is another example of how athletic departments still do not have nearly the financial weight that a university does. The new proposal is based on financial need, with student-athletes only being eligible for the grant if their athletic scholarship, other grants and scholarships, and Expected Family Contribution is less than the cost of attendance.

Still missing from the new concept is part of the original proposal which was normally overlooked by the public: an almost total deregulation of non-athletics aid. In equivalency sports, once a student-athlete receives any athletics aid at all and becomes a counter, all financial aid he or she is receiving from the institution is also included when determining how much the student-athlete counts against team financial aid limits, subject to some exceptions.

This is not the first time this idea has come up. In 2009 and 2010, Division I discussed the idea as part of a comprehensive review of the financial aid rules. The cabinet decided not to move forward with the concept, instead going ahead with more limited deregulation of state and federal financial aid.

When you look at the financial muscle of a university, it is easy to see why schools are wary of removing all regulations in this area. Stanford recently completed a $6.2 billion fundraising campaign which created $250 million in new need-based financial aid. That’s three times Stanford’s total athletics budget. If Stanford’s student-athletes received a proportional amount of this new financial aid (they represent 12% of the student population), $30 million in additional financial aid would flow to athletes, almost twice what Stanford spends on athletic scholarships.

It is reasonable to ask why having more money in your athletic department is considered a fair advantage but having a bigger and better financial aid office across campus is a threat to competitive equity. The impact though is not debatable. Look at the success of the Ivy League, which neatly bypasses non-athletics aid limits by not giving athletic scholarships (something to consider in the debate over whether they should start). Ivy student-athletes are free to accept all the financial aid they can get their hands on, and as the Ancient Eight expands aid available to the middle class, results are translating to the fields, courts, rinks, and pools.

If major deregulation of these limits ever happens, coaches would not need to bully financial aid offices for it to be a gamechanger. Financial need and academic merit would become just as important as athletic talent, if not more so. Coaches whose recruiting lines up with the institution’s larger efforts to attract students would be at a tremendous advantage. And if a mega booster gives $20 million to endow scholarships that might help the baseball team, is that so bad if the vast majority of the aid just goes to needy students in general?

None of this will happen though unless institutions realize and accept the true size of an athletic department, especially financially. When classes are cancelled to accommodate the crowd for a home game, it might seem like athletics dominates the university. Expanding athletics aid by $2,000 even just for needy students is a significant addition to an athletics budget. When it comes to finances though, it’s clear who is the tail and who is the dog. What’s not clear is who should be wagging whom.

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: , ,

You Cannot Stop Signing Day

February 6, 2012 by

In late January or early February every year, there is a new round of consternation about the growth of football’s Signing Day. Once only a day of celebration for recruits and watched by only the most ardent fans and boosters, signing day has gone mainstream, thanks to television, recruiting websites, and social media.

That growth has led to a circus atmosphere and a culture of oneupmanship between prospects and coaches. Recruits are coming up with ever more creative ways to indicate they have picked a school, with small animals and children now part of the act. While coaches are hemmed in to some degree by recruiting rules, they have explored every bit of space given and somehow manage to find something new to try every year.

There have been more and more calls to end signing day and return to the days before the National Letter of Intent when prospects could sign whenever they chose. With less focus on one day at the beginning of February, prospects would commit and sign whenever they feel most comfortable. Recruiting and signing would be a year-round process with less pressure to wrap it up on a specific day.

If the goal is to reduce attention on the recruiting process and make it a more private decision involving the player and the college coach, that horse has left the barn. With no signing day, each top prospect would get their own signing day. As much signing day can be a circus, it is still a communal experience prospects share with the rest of their class, future teammates and friends who play other sports.

There will always be a day that prospects can start signing scholarship offers. The only way to make that day irrelevant is to make it so early that most college coaches will not commit to a prospect at that time. But some will, so you would need to be comfortable with freshmen in high school or eighth graders signing scholarships, even if it would be only a small fraction of recruits.

There’s also the small matter of the NLI. Even the strongest opponent of the NLI should recognize the need for a prospect to be able to shutdown the recruiting process. But even the most ardent supporter of the NLI would probably agree that underclassmen in high school should not be signing anything which locks them into their choice, even temporarily. That means there must be a point where prospects can start to really end the recruiting process and that day is likely to be late enough (junior or senior year) that prospects will be ready to commit, especially if the pressure is focused on that specific day.

Much like democracy, the February signing date is the worst way for prospects to sign with a school, except for all the others. The season is over and coaching changes have mostly been made. It sets the date for committing to a school at roughly the time most high school seniors commit to attending a college. And prospects do not have to sign on signing day, an option more and more are taking, especially during basketball’s early signing period.

By and large signing day is harmless fun. Kids who have worked hard from a very young age get a day to celebrate the culmination of that effort and get to do it with their peers, parents, coaches, and teachers. All of the negatives associated with signing day are so ingrained in the recruiting process that getting rid of signing day will only move those problems rather than combat them.

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: , ,

News not fit to print

February 3, 2012 by

The NCAA should not be immune to criticism. Any organization this big and complicated is going to need frequent corrective action. But while the NCAA is not always right, neither is it always wrong, which brings us to Joe Nocera’s month-long, error-laden and questionably motivated mugging in The New York Times. 

Nocera is a Times business columnist who lately has become obsessed with all things NCAA. The most recent beatdown began with a 5,000-word treatise in The New York Times Magazine in December detailing a pay-for-play plan. At the same time, Nocera wrote a misguided column about the motivations behind Division I’s consideration of an override to the proposed $2,000 miscellaneous expense allowance.

Those pieces contained factual errors, which the NCAA immediately noted to Nocera and his editors. The boldness of asking for a correction apparently angered Nocera, who responded to NCAA staff member Stacey Osburn by saying: “I’ll correct it, but you won’t like it.”

He followed up with a column saying he was mistaken; the NCAA is even worse than he thought. In so doing, he altered the traditional observation that you shouldn’t fight with those who buy ink by the barrel; apparently, you shouldn’t even respond to them.

The NCAA also agitated Nocera by noting his relationship with the communications director for one of the law firms involved in the pending “likeness” litigation against the NCAA. That person is Nocera’s fiancée, but a reader would know that only by wading 4,000 words into Nocera’s Dec. 30 article on pay-for-play.

The conflict-of-interest question was meaty enough that the Poynter Institute (journalism watchdogs) evaluated  whether a problem existed. Nocera and the Times likely took comfort in the Institute’s conclusion that one did not, but a reasonable person could see it otherwise. Put another way, if a Times columnist were engaged to Barack Obama’s press secretary, would that relationship be an issue if she trashed Mitt Romney nonstop for a month?

So, where does Nocera’s crusade stand now?

For starters, Nocera has become a cyber chatterbox, blogging relentlessly on the NCAA. One blog provided parsed words and phrases on the NCAA’s Ryan Boatright eligibility announcement to position the NCAA as the most malevolent force imaginable. He also used the blog to create a contest for readers to submit the NCAA’s worst rule. In making his point, he claimed the NCAA penalized a track student-athlete for taking her baby to a meet on the road. In fact, the issue related to the school covering expenses for her boyfriend, who is the child’s father. He subsequently assailed the NCAA’s Osburn for somehow violating privacy laws by attempting to correct the record, even though she did not name any students in her response.

Yesterday, Nocera took on CBS’ Seth Davis, calling him NCAA President Mark Emmert’s “favorite lapdog reporter,” although Nocera struck through “lapdog,” whatever that means.

At what point does somebody with the power to make it stop say this has gotten out of control? The NCAA is not perfect, but there’s plenty of room between being perfect and being the goon squad that Nocera projects.

The NCAA is not alone in dealing with Nocera’s complexities. He experienced a previous conflict-of-interest episode, also involving the fiancée, that was problematic enough for a rebuke. Last August, he was forced to apologize to Tea Party members for calling them terrorists.

Again, remember that we’re talking about the New York Times, not Deadspin. These days, sadly, it’s hard to tell the difference.

About Dave Pickle

Filed Under: Feature, NCAA Insider

How-To Guide for Moving the Basketball Season

February 1, 2012 by

One-semester sports are starting to get a buzz in the NCAA. As much as there is a push for a football playoff, most ideas try and end the season before the start of the spring semester. Dan Wolken of The Daily is not the first person to lay out a plan for a college basketball season that starts in January and ends in May, but his is one of the more complete and detailed efforts.

The reason for the push for one-semester seasons is that it often good not just for ratings and marketing but seems to make sense for academics as well. I’m not entirely sold on the academic benefits though. Squeezing games into one semester could mean more missed class time and finals during conference or NCAA tournaments. Perhaps a year-long season with fewer midweek games and a lighter practice schedule is better for academics.

If you move the basketball season to the spring, it’s not just a matter of moving the start and end dates. Some other rules would change and in the end, basketball would look a lot more like non-revenue sports than it does now.

1. Fall Basketball
Just because basketball teams would not be playing games in the fall that counted doesn’t mean there would be no fall basketball season. No sport is stuck with the NCAA’s strict limits on offseason practice for an entire semester.

Basketball’s nonchampionship segment would likely be a hybrid of fall baseball and women’s basketball preseason practice. A set of rules might look like this:

  • 30 days of practice and competition;
  • During a 45 consecutive day period;
  • During the months of September, October and November.

There would games as well. Basketball teams are currently limited to 27 games plus an exempt tournament or 29 games. Teams could play some of those games as exhibitions in the fall, or use their exempt contests like closed practice scrimmages or games against non-DI college. This would make scheduling easier, cutting down on the number of non-DI games played during the season and non-conference home and home matchups.

2. Academic Rules
The two biggest one-semester sports, football and baseball, each have their own special academic rules. This is to address the issue that if student-athletes have no competition that counts during a semester (spring for football, fall for baseball), they have less motivation to be eligible for that semester.

To combat this, football student-athletes are now required to earn nine (rather than six) hours during the fall term or risk being suspended for the beginning of the following season. Baseball student-athletes must be eligible at the start of the fall semester to play in the spring; they may not regain academic eligibility after the fall term.[1]

As a spring sport, basketball would likely get some version of baseball’s rule. While more difficult classes might be scheduled in the fall, student-athletes would still need to enroll full-time, meet the six-hour rule for the spring, and meet the 18-hour rule for the academic year or miss the entire following season.

3. Summer Basketball
If basketball became a single semester sport, there would be less need for the new summer practice rules. It would be less useful for competitive purposes, but more importantly it would be hard to even find the time. If the season lasted until late May, it may be a challenge to schedule the eight weeks of practice that coincidences with summer school terms, fits with the July recruiting periods, and is worth having when the season just ended.

It does not necessarily mean the idea would be scrapped. It would still be beneficial to have student-athletes work out with an institution’s coaches rather than private trainers, which avoids some potential amateurism issues. On shakier ground might be summer basketball leagues which could be less popular after a season that ends in May. Then again, that has not stopped summer baseball leagues from flourishing.

4. Transfers and Midyear Enrollees
Finally, it would be interesting to see how patterns of transfers develop. On the one hand, a midyear transfer looks a lot more attractive because after sitting out one year, you will get to play in the entire following season. On the other hand, some of the issues that cause midyear transfers, like a lack of early playing time, would not come up because the season has not started.

Midyear freshmen enrollees, which were something of a trend this year, would become more popular.[2] This would make the spring NLI signing period for basketball less important. Some prospects who would have signed in the spring will instead wait, graduate from high school, and then be available to enroll for the following spring semester when the situation surrounding a team is clearer. It might become the norm for one-and-done athletes to spend only a single semester in college.

Like my idea for a year-round football season, the biggest problem with such a radical change is that you cannot test it. You do some comparable research and make inferences, but it comes down to a leap of faith that this is the right thing for student-athletes and the sport.

  1. That is one example of a rule that is in numerous places in Bylaw 14.  ↩

  2. Midyear junior college and graduate transfers would still be blocked by a longtime basketball rule that was recently extended to baseball. That rule also exists in other areas of the transfer bylaws.  ↩

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: , ,

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