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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: , ,

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: ,

A COA Q&A

September 29, 2011 by

It appears no recent NCAA rule change has caught the imagination of the public quite like a possible increase of scholarship limits to cover unitemized expenses in the cost of attending a school. While a new reform movement is underway, cost of attendance is an old friend. Cost of attendance scholarships were last formally proposed in 2002 (Proposal 2002–83-B), but were defeated in favor of allowing athletes to receive other financial aid to cover the gap between a full grant-in-aid and cost of attendance (Proposal 2002–83-A).

Prior to now, it was hard to come up with on opinion of cost of attendance scholarships because we had no idea what the proposal would be. It could have been a relatively minor change to address revenue sports. Or it could have been an exotic proposal for only full scholarship athletes that would have dramatically changed recruiting in equivalency sports. Without knowing what the proposal was among 5–7 options, all you could do was be in favor of the idea in principle or not.

After the presidential retreat, the Board of Directors appointed working groups to address certain issues. In October, the BoD will hear recommendations from the group focused on student-athlete well being. A member of that group, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, let slip what the group was working on. On that note, here’s a Q&A on where the issue stands.

Q: What is the proposal?

A: The proposal is to increase the limit on athletic scholarships from tuition, fees, room, board, and books to the lesser of the cost of attendance or the current limit plus $2,000. In equivalency sports, the amount of the $2,000 would be prorated. The proposal would also be on a conference basis, meaning that a conference would likely need to adopt a conference rule to authorize its members to use the increased scholarship limits.

Q: Are there still some unknowns?

A: Yes. One question is how much freedom coaches in equivalency sports would have. The amount is prorated, but there is no indication if coaches have to give it to athletes. Two examples to compare:

  • A full grant-in-aid is $20,000. A women’s soccer student-athlete receives a $10,000 scholarship. The student-athlete receives an additional $1,000 per year under the new proposal.
  • A full grant-in-aid is $20,000. A women’s soccer student-athlete receives a $10,000 scholarship. The student-athlete receives no additional aid, but the coach has an additional $30,000 (15 x $2,000) to give to other athletes.

Another question is whether athletes will always get cash. A full scholarship football player would get $2,000 unless he has parking tickets or overdue books on his account. But does our women’s soccer athlete above get $1,000 cash, or just another $1,000 toward tuition?

Q: How much would it cost?

Because the proposal covers all sports, cost depends on how many sports an institution sponsors. Stanford’s associate AD of business strategy and revenue enhancement estimated it would cost the school $750,000. Stanford runs the largest athletic department in the country, so that number might be considered to be something of a maximum.

To figure out a rough estimate of cost, we need to figure out the average athletic department. The NCAA’s membership report has the average number of men’s and women’s sports sponsored by FBS, FCS, and non-football institutions. The NCAA’s sport sponsorship and participation report lists which sports are sponsored by the most institutions. So combining the two, we can figure out an “average” athletic department and estimate the costs based on scholarship limits. And those costs are:

  • FBS: $504,400
  • FCS: $436,400
  • Non-Football: $282,400

Obvious in those figures is the effect of football. An FBS football team can expect an increased scholarship bill of up to $170,000 while an FCS program should set aside $126,000. The range for athletic departments that fully fund all their teams would probably be somewhere between $200,000 and $750,000.

Q: What about four-year scholarships?

A: The same working group is also working on a multi-year scholarship proposal. Swarbrick’s comments suggest that four-year scholarships are on the same fast track as the cost of attendance proposal.

Q: What is the next step?

A: The Board of Directors will take up both proposals in October. Most likely is that the Board will forward proposals to the membership for a vote in January. Given the widespread support from both presidents and athletic directors, passage seems likely. The BoD could choose to skip the Legislative Council and adopt the proposals as emergency or noncontroversial legislation. That seems unlikely since the proposal is not one of minimal impact and more debate could improve the proposal. And given the proposal would most likely apply to the next round of scholarships (2012–13) at the earliest, undue hardship is not likely if adoption occurs in January vs. October.

Q: What do you think of the cost of attendance proposal?

A: The reason cost of attendance was not adopted sooner is the wide variations in the gap between cost of attendance and a full grant-in-aid. The National College Players Association calculated gaps of $200 to almost $11,000. The number also represents an amount of cash that athletes will receive and is thought to be subject to manipulation, although that would have far-reaching consequences for all other students at the institution.

A person’s opinion on this proposal is telling as to their attitude toward the NCAA. Ultimately the proposal means more financial aid for student-athletes. This is a good thing. Division I should continually work to provide as much financial aid for as many athletes as possible, so this is just one step in a process that should never end.

College athletics will not be perfected overnight. If that is the measure of NCAA reform, the NCAA is set up for failure. This proposal moves Division I closer to providing the proper amount of financial support for athletes. It does not go all the way, but it is a big step closer. To reject the proposal as inadequate and evidence of the NCAA’s corruption or apathy is to hold the NCAA and its members to an impossibly high standard.

Q: What about the multi-year scholarship idea?

A: It is harder to have an opinion on the multi-year scholarship proposal since there are so few details. There is one reason for pessimism though and it is this quote from Swarbrick:

“The process for nonrenewal of an annual grant probably would look just like the process for terminating a four-year grant.”

That means that a scholarship could be cancelled between years for any reason, just like a scholarship could be nonrenewed for any reason. Multi-year scholarships only work if cancellation is subject to at least the same conditions as canceling a scholarship during the year now. That can only be done for one of five reasons:

  1. The student-athlete renders him- or herself ineligible for competition;
  2. The student-athlete is guilty of gross misconduct;
  3. The student-athlete lies to the university;
  4. The student-athlete quits the team; or
  5. The student-athlete violates a non-athletic, non-medical condition in the scholarship agreement.

Unless these conditions are kept for multi-year scholarships, the change is mostly administrative. Scholarships would not need to be renewed from year to year, but could be cancelled in between academic years. It would be a net loss for student-athlete welfare, since currently the actual contract an athlete or prospect signs must be for one year only.

Four years is also a bit of a red herring. After one year, five years, six years, or until graduation make the most sense. The five-year clock is the most important eligibility rule in Division I, and six years is the federal standard for earning a bachelor’s degree. But four years is no less arbitrary than $2,000 and under the right circumstances would be as much an improvement for student-athletes, so I will not complain about four vs. five vs. six.

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: , ,

Realignment’s Effect on the NCAA

September 19, 2011 by

Conference realignment in the NCAA has generally resulted in more conferences. When the Southwest Conference folded, Conference USA was created out of it. The Mountain West Conference was created when the Western Athletic Conference (the original 16 team football conference) split in two. Conference movement is a constant across all of Division I. Since 1985, only 1992–93 saw no conference movement.

A lot of how the NCAA works seems to be geared toward steady growth in member institutions and member conferences. When the size of Division I grows, a lot of things happen almost automatically. Tournaments expand, the governance structure grows and shifts, and the administrative needs of Division I are reassessed.

When the number of conferences shrink, what happens is less clear. Nothing needs to happen. If a conference disappears, but not its member institutions, that just means another at-large bid is available to tournaments where the conference qualified for automatic qualification. The conference can be removed from the governance structure, which may not even affect all committees and cabinets. This is a feature of the way the NCAA operates. This allows the very autonomous institutions of the NCAA to shift around without toppling the structure above.

The current events may necessitate action. The conferences that might cease to exist would be among the largest and most powerful conferences in the governance structure. At some point realignment driven by football may be deemed to be too much for multi-sport conferences and the idea of an institution being a member of one conference for most sports could end.

Votes in the Legislative Council would be substantially changed. If the number of large FBS conferences dropped to four, it would mean that without another change, six votes are lost in the Legislative Council. The four superconferences would have a majority on FBS issues and one would assume be able to vote as a bloc more effectively with four rather than six constituencies. But on issues facing all of Division I, the FBS conference would lose their majority. All 20 FCS and non-football conferences would need to be united and it would only be a small majority, but it would be a shift in the delicate balance.

The way votes are distributed amongst the Division I conferences means consensus tends to rule the day. The Legislative Council rarely votes on “party line” and legislation is rarely adopted via a close vote. Generally a consensus is found or proposals are modified before going to a coin-flip vote. There’s value to maintaining the current legislative structure and distribution of votes since it has seemed to produce a legislative process that serves the needs of the greatest number of institutions. It also appears good for student-athletes. In 2010–11, the Legislative Council voted against the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee position only three times.

Going back to institutional voting would radically change how the NCAA is governed but it might be necessary. Voting would be less about consensus and more about majorities since the same type of debate would be impossible. One could see the end of the Legislative Council as a voting body, with institutions getting together to discuss legislation (formally or informally) but voting and institutional positions managed online. Groups like NACDA (and its affiliates) and coaches associations would become more important in developing legislative positions.

If multi-sport conferences disappear, that could mean more conferences than institutions, as every sport looks to rebuild the structure provided by today’s conferences. Conference based governance would be impossible, changing the relationship between the NCAA and its members. Without a middleman, the NCAA would deal with institutions on an individual basis. That would roll back the delegation of some functions to conferences, like administering medical hardship waivers (a.k.a medical redshirts) and the reporting of the most minor violations.

Pretty much everyone in college athletics wishes this round of conference realignment is over. With such major changes possible, the hope is that a period of stability will follow. I agree with President Emmert that an “NCAA Commissioner” deciding who will be in what conference is not likely and not a positive. There might be a role for the NCAA to establish a more formal, national process for when and how institutions change conference affiliation.

Once the dust settles on conference realignment though, the effect at the national level needs to be sorted out. That means this is both an opportunity for major change and unanswered questions presenting a possible hurdle to reform. Either way, these conference changes are more likely to be the first act rather than the final one.

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: , , ,
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