You are here: Home / Archives for reform

Skin in the Game

April 7, 2012 by

I’m generally dismissive of anyone who claims one bylaw will change everything in college athletics, just like I’m generally dismissive of the idea that college athletics could be run on two rules, 10 commandments, or a rule book smaller than about 100 pages. Where college athletics to ever become professionalized, I would expect more rules rather than fewer.

That doesn’t mean rule changes cannot have an outsized effect. Twice I’ve listed small rule changes that would make a big difference to how college athletics is run, student-athlete welfare, or competitive equity. There is one other rule I would add. It is not small at all, but would (hopefully) radically change how colleges think about their athletics departments. First the bylaw, then the explanation:

Bylaw 20.9.1 Financial Commitment
A member institution or member conference shall hold in reserve an amount equal to the annual operating budget of the athletics department. Member institutions shall deposit funds into this reserve from dedicated tuition increases and student fees only.

Bylaw 20.9.1.1 Initial Commitment
At the end of the fiscal year following the adoption of this bylaw, member institutions and conferences shall deposit an amount equaling 20% of the athletics budget into the reserve fund. At the end of the second, third, and fourth fiscal year, the institution or conference shall also deposit 20% of the athletics budget into the reserve fund. At the end of the fifth year, institutions and conferences shall come into full compliance with the bylaw.

Bylaw 20.9.1.2 Institutions Reclassifying to Division I
An institution’s application to reclassify to Division I will not be considered unless it has in reserve an amount equal to the athletics department’s projected budget for the institution’s first year in Division I.

The problem is that while many stakeholders are becoming increasingly certain of the importance of college athletics (particularly college football and men’s basketball), at the same time another group with some overlap is becoming increasingly certain that colleges should not pay for their athletics programs. As a result, we have louder and louder cries for a new NCAA division or a new association altogether composed of just schools that can generate enough revenue to pay for their athletics departments without institutional subsidy.

That idea belittles college athletics and undermines many arguments of pay-for-play proponents. It assumes that college athletics is either so insignificant or so far from the university’s mission that it is wrong for a university to decide to invest in intercollegiate athletics. If we assume institutions should not pay for athletics, then whether institutions should have athletics departments at all is a legitimate question.

Granted, not all decisions to provide institutional support to athletics are equal. There is a difference between a bare majority of trustees voting for a tuition increase for athletics and students voting to raise fees on themselves to support the athletics department. But there’s also a cost to the institution in allowing or requiring athletics to be self-sufficient, namely the loss of control that comes from not having the purse strings in hand.

There are two other advantages to linking an athletics department’s budget to the willingness of the institution to put up its own money. First, it means that athletics departments become much more like any other university department when it comes to budgeting. Having a $100 million athletics department would mean there is $100 million in an account. If the university is facing financial difficulties, it is much easier to ask the athletics department to share in the hardship, even if athletics is totally self-sufficient. All the university needs to do is withdraw money from the account.

Second, it puts something of a break on the expansion of athletics budgets. If a conference signs a big new TV contact, institutions cannot use the money unless they are willing to raise tuition or student fees to add to the reserve account. The interest or returns on the reserve fund operate as a normal, annual increase in funding for the athletics department. And if the athletics department is bringing in more revenue than the reserve fund allows them to spend, that money could go back to the institution or saved for a rainy day.

How athletics departments are funded is one of the biggest reasons why athletics seems to be drifting further from the university’s core mission. Part of this is because universities, by and large, operate the athletics department they are able to afford, especially if the athletics department is doing most or all of the funding. Requiring the university and students to put up their own money will hopefully create athletics departments that universities are willing and able to fund.

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: ,

All It Takes Is One

March 21, 2012 by

Many people have moved from asking whether college athletes should be paid or why they should be paid to how they could be paid. It’s a fatalistic position based on the fact that everywhere in the world, amateur sports eventually lost out to professional sports. The US has the odd quirk of attaching high level athletics to higher education but whether that ultimately makes a difference remains to be seen. For pay-for-play advocates, the answer is already that it should not.

But the more interesting question is when. Or more specifically what will be the trigger that sets in motion the move to professional college athletics? Candidates emerge and are annointed all the time. Newspaper and magazine articles, lawsuits, possible unionization, an influx of money into college athletes are all pointed to as being the tipping point. So far, none have panned out and the whole exercise is becoming a bit like the boy who cried wolf. But a possible answer has come from Brazil. It could be as simple as waiting for the best football or basketball player ever.

Even the casual sports fan knows of Lionel Messi but few outside of soccer fans are familiar with Neymar. Neymar is the future of the Brazilian National Team and may be the only player alive right now who could challenge Messi over his career. Neymar is a little younger than Messi, but should be doing battle with him in Spain’s La Liga or in the Champions League. An even more frightening prospect is the idea of the two of them as teammates at Barcelona. But while Messi is the star NBA point guard, Neymar has so far played the role of the streetball legend.

The reason is that many forces well beyond Neymar’s control are keeping him from leaving his boyhood Sao Paulo club of Santos. Chief among them is the convoluted ownership of Neymar’s transfer rights. Normally soccer clubs own these rights, buying and selling players on the transfer market. Neymar is the classic case of third-party ownership. In exchange for paying a portion of his salary, a number of third parties (agents and investment funds typically) own a portion of Neymar’s transfer rights. European clubs typically must buy out all of the third-party owners in addition to the original club. In Neymar’s case, that means at least two investment funds, the club, and Neymar himself (his company owns 10% of his transfer rights). All of these parties are looking for a return on their investment, meaning the total transfer fee needed is approaching record levels.

Money could solve all those problems, and despite upcoming financial fair play rules and clubs suffering with debt and losses, there surely exists a team on the continent who could pony up the transfer fee, which could approach nine figures (in dollars, euros, or pounds, however you care to slice it). But other forces are at work. For starters, Brazil’s robust economy compared to Europe is keeping players like Neymar within the means of Brazilian clubs:

 A few short years ago, there would be nothing to debate. Financial realities already would have forced Neymar across the Atlantic. Brazilian football simply would not be able to afford him. Times have changed, though. Europe is in crisis. Brazil’s economy has been enjoying a consumer-led boom. For companies seeking to connect with those consumers, an involvement with football makes sense. Sponsors, then, can be brought on board to help with the wages that big-name players can command as much at home as by moving to Europe.

Those means extend all the way to the government. Banco do Brasil, one of the country’s largest banks, was prepared to help finance Neymar’s new contract with Santos. Banco do Brasil also happens to be state-run. In the end a private bank stepped in, albeit with with an extensive sponsorship deal that may further complicate a future move for the player.

Beyond means though is the possibility of revolutionizing Brazilian soccer. In most countries, the United States included, clubs run their own league, sharing some of the power with the national federation. In Brazil though, state federations have disproportionately high influence in the structure of the game. The result is that major clubs in Brazil spend January through May participating in state leagues against tiny clubs. Imagine the Lakers having to spend the offseason playing semi-pro and amateur teams, with even the right to stay in the NBA on the line and you get a sense of the idea. One hope is that as the big clubs gain the financial might to challenge European teams for players, they will also gain the political power to break away from the state championships and create a national league and cup system similar to the rest of the world.

What does all this have to do with college sports? For starters, one athlete in a different hemisphere under a totally different set of rules has encapsulated many of the issues and debates facing college athletics. How much should governments invest in or interfere with athletic teams? Should programs be run to maximize the success of a few teams or athletes or to provide as many opportunities as possible (Santos shut down its women’s team and its futsal team, a form of indoor soccer, just to pay Neymar)? How much of how a program is run or control over an athlete’s career should be ceded to third parties (or the club itself)? How important is regional vs. national interest? And what is the responsibility of the haves to maintain some degree of competitive equity or even engage in competition at all with the have nots?

Collegiate athletics can also learn from the fact that one athlete, simply by being a great athlete, could potentially cause massive change to how a sport operates in an entire country. It would be like if LeBron James had decided to go to college and stay for four years, so the entire structure of the NCAA was changed to accommodate him. The main difference might be that while there might not be true alternatives in either Brazil or the United States for Brazil’s professional leagues and college athletics, in the US there are at least potential alternatives, like professional youth leagues or amateur development operated by national governing bodies.

Could it happen here? The short answer is: it depends. The long answer is that it will and already has, in bits and pieces. Athletes who are “too good” for college have been a problem solved in a myriad of ways across the many sports the NCAA oversees. Generally they’re presented with a choice: amateurism and education in the NCAA or payment and training in a professional setting. We’ve yet to have a major showdown between a once-in-a-generation athlete who desperately wants to go to college and an NCAA not designed to accommodate him or her (given that this would almost certainly be a football or men’s basketball athlete, probably him).

Because potential alternatives exist, it would require abandoning the assumption that colleges, backed by state and federal taxpayers and committed to different missions should be involved in the development of elite athletes and asking the hard question about whether they should. An American Neymar is almost a certainty in the foreseeable future (15–20 years). But rather than moving the NCAA and its members forward, the major change could be the end of elite, commercial college athletics.

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: ,

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: ,

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: , ,

Consolidation of Powers

January 16, 2012 by

Back in October, the Board of Directors took unprecedented action when they adopted new initial eligibility standards, a $2,000 miscellaneous expense allowance, multi-year scholarships, and a new men’s basketball recruiting model. It was so unprecedented that the membership pushed back with overrides of both the expense allowance and multi-year scholarships, going so far as to suspend the $2,000 stipend for the time being.

By comparison, the actions of the Board of Directors at the 2012 NCAA Convention were relatively mundane. The Board refused to implement a few of the ideas suggested by the Resource Allocation Working Group, including scholarship cuts to football and women’s basketball and the end of foreign tours. The Board adopted a moratorium on increases in the length of seasons and the number of games and ordered a study on appropriate limits, with a special focus on basketball. And they completed the work of the Leadership Council by adopting a model for on-campus tryouts and summer practice in men’s basketball.

The group missing from all this action is the Legislative Council. Bold new ideas were adopted without passing them through the primary lawmaking body of the NCAA. In addition, at the request of one working group, the Legislative Council tabled 50 of the 82 active proposals. The Legislative Council will spend another year on the sidelines as well, after the Board of Directors agreed to suspend the legislative process to allow the Rules Working Group to complete their work of picking apart and putting back together the NCAA Division I Manual.[1]

Freezing the Legislative Council out is responsible for a significant amount of the backlash against the Presidential Retreat initiatives. The reason is simple. On the Legislative Council, all 31 Division I conferences have a representative.[2] On the Board of Directors, all 11 FBS conferences have a representative, but the other 20 FCS and non-football conferences share 7 representatives. In addition, none of the Presidential Retreat working groups have representation from all conferences and some conferences have no representatives on any of the groups.

Since 2010, there has been a push by FCS and non-football leagues to expand the Board of Directors to include all conferences, lead by the Northeast Conference and Big South Conference. That would create a more representative 31-member board, potentially one which would have the same type of weighted voting as the Legislative Council.[3] But that creates an unwieldy and parallel legislative process where a proposal has to pass through two bodies representing the same group of institutions, one populated by presidents and the other populated by athletic administrators, who are expected to be working at the direction of their presidents.

The solution then is to get rid of the Legislative Council and expand the Board of Directors to include all conferences. Voting could be weighted or not. The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee could be given a representative for a nice, even 32. Individual schools still have a chance to be heard through the override process.

This would be the most visible symbol of the push toward presidential control of college athletics. The primary law-making body would be composed of presidents. The legislative cycle could even be disbanded or tweaked to allow issues to be addressed more quickly. And the override process gives athletic administrators the chance to pitch their individual president (who controls the requests and the vote) on that school’s objections to a proposal.

The other chief benefit would come after the new Division I Manual is introduced to the world about 18 months from now. The challenge is not to make a new manual that is easier to understand and only focuses on serious issues. The hard part is to keep the manual that way. Presidents are more likely to only take up serious issues of national importance. You would expect the Board of Directors to adopt fewer proposals that address purely competitive equity issues brought up by only a few conferences.

The downside is the lack of an expert body to vet legislation, since the Legislative Council is composed mostly of athletic administrators with a compliance background and the occasional faculty athletics representative. But the Leadership Council (composed mostly of athletic directors) would still exist. And the National Association for Athletics Compliance (NAAC) or some new NCAA committee could act in an advisory capacity for the presidents on the board.[4]

The presidential retreat initiatives are asking NCAA members not to just to accept some changes, but to accept a new way of doing business. Since the work of fixing and improving college athletics is an ongoing process, that change should be manifested in changes to way NCAA rules are made. If so, the current appetite for reform has a chance to gather enough momentum to stop being a movement and start being the new business as usual.

  1. Insert Six Million Dollar Man reference here. “We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was before. Better, thinner, clearer.”  ↩

  2. The Pioneer Football League also has a representative who votes on FCS issues only.  ↩

  3. The conferences with BCS automatic qualification and Conference USA get three votes. The other FBS conferences get 1.5 votes. All other conferences get 1.2 votes.  ↩

  4. The Collegiate Model-Rules Working Group has already stated an intention to work with NAAC in crafting the new manual.  ↩

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: , ,

Second Annual New Year, New Rules

December 28, 2011 by

Last year, in response to ESPN the Magazine inexplicably publishing an issue about new rules that included not one NCAA regulation, I came up with six tweaks that would have an outsized impact on college athletics, one for each working bylaw in the NCAA Manual. ESPN’s gimmick is gone, but I kept it. This year I expanded it to seven rules, splitting Bylaw 15 (financial aid) and Bylaw 16 (awards and benefits) which were combined last year. So here is the Second Annual List of New Rules for the New Year.

Bylaw 11 (Athletics Personnel) – Dump the Test
The coaches recruiting certification exam is an annual rite of passage at NCAA institutions. The test used to be 40 questions over 80 minutes and was recently cut down to 30 questions over 60 minutes. It is open book (i.e. the NCAA Manual) and it includes mostly recruiting rules but sometimes rules about eligibility or financial aid as well. Coaches have to score an 80% on the exam. Fail to do so, and a coach may not recruit until he or she passes the exam, which they cannot do for another month.

But the most important function of the test is what surrounds it. Coaches gather for a rules review with the Compliance Office where they go over new legislation, get a refresher in the trickier recruiting rules, and have an opportunity to ask questions. It is that rules review which is more helpful than the actual test itself. The test just provides a convenient reason to get everyone in a room together.

If you read the certification requirement, the recruiting exam is just one required part of being certified to recruited off-campus. Instead, the education session (say four hours for coaches new to college athletics and two hours as continuing education) should be the greater emphasis. And if conferences or institutions wish to continue developing an exam, they can assume the expense to do so.

Bylaw 12 (Amateurism) – Competition with Professionals
Most people at this point are familiar with Proposal 2009–22, which permitted a prospect to compete on professional teams prior to his or her initial enrollment in college. But 2009–22 is just an exception to the more basic rule, that competition on a professional team ends an athlete’s collegiate eligibility. And the definition of a professional team remains very broad, covering any team where even one individual receives compensation above he or her expenses.

Competing with a professional team, at least during vacation periods outside of the traditional season, does not pass the litmus test for an amateurism rule. It does necessarily mean an athlete has received pay. And it is not strong enough evidence that a student-athlete has decided to leave college (unlike hiring an agent or skipping out on class to play on a pro team). Allowing competition with professional teams during the time when outside competition is currently allowed also allows better opportunities to be developed for current athletes (like an NBA college summer league for example).

Bylaw 13 (Recruiting) – Only Kids Get in Free
Much of the talk in recruiting regulation has been about relationships. Coaches need fewer recruiting regulations to build relationships with athletes that combat the influences of the dreaded “third party”. But Bylaw 13.8.1 promotes coaches developing relationships with these third parties by allowing high school coaches, AAU or 7-on–7 coaches, and junior college coaches to receive two free tickets to a regular season home game.

If relationships with prospects are the key to combating third party influence and cutting down on transfer rates, no one connected to a prospect should get a free ticket to a game without bringing the prospect. The regulations on official and/or unofficial visits could be loosened to give a prospect an extra ticket to bring a coach. But the recruiting regulations should allow the entertaining of people who have influence over a prospect if the prospect is nowhere to be found.

Bylaw 14 (Eligibility) – Degree Progress Get Out of Jail Free Card
Fulfilling progress towards degree rules requires a student-athlete keep up with three different regulations:

The first and third requirements are typically duplicative. The six and 18 credits an athlete must earn each semester or academic year keeps them on track to meet the 40/60/80% degree requirements. Except when the percentage of degree gets out of line with the credit hour requirements, which happens when an athlete gets ahead. Then they might be unable to complete the credit hour requirements because they ran out of credits to take, requiring a waiver. Or the credit hour requirements keep them from exploring electives.

Completing a percentage of your degree is the more important rule, so it should trump the credit hour requirements. If an athlete is ahead by a certain percentage and meeting (or beating by some amount) the GPA requirement, they should be exempt from the credit hour requirement. This way student-athletes who went above and beyond early in their academic careers gain more freedom to take what they want later on.

Bylaw 15 (Financial Aid) – End the Recruited/Not Recruited Distinction
Recruiting is a funny word. It has a formal definition that sounds exactly like what you expect a definition to sound like in a legal code:

Recruiting is any solicitation of a prospective student-athlete or a prospective student-athlete’s relatives (or legal guardians) by an institutional staff member or by a representative of the institution’s athletics interests for the purpose of securing the prospective student-athlete’s enrollment and ultimate participation in the institution’s intercollegiate athletics program.

But for practical purposes, that definition is trumped by three other, more technical requirements. There is the definition of a recruited prospect in Bylaw 13. There is the definition of a recruited prospect for men’s basketball camp purposes. And there is the definition a recruited prospect in Bylaw 15. That status attaches when ever a school:

  • Provides an official visit to a prospect;
  • Has in-person, off-campus contact with a prospect; or
  • Makes a written offer of financial aid to a prospect.

Once a prospect becomes recruited, how they count in financial aid limits changes. For example, if they are a football or basketball player, they may not receive any institutional financial aid without counting against the team’s limits. However, a coach can evaluate a prospect numerous times, call them as much as the rules allow, and offer them free tickets to any home event on an unlimited number of unofficial visits. Those activities would definitely meet the NCAA’s more fundamental definition.

If the distinction is meaningful, the technical definitions of a recruited student-athlete need to match the NCAA’s core definition. That would mean a definition that looks like the men’s basketball camp definition, which means an athlete would need to show up on campus with essentially no prior contact with the athletics department. And if the distinction is not meaningful anymore, it should be removed in favor of a rule which more precisely addresses using the financial aid office to get around scholarship limits.

Bylaw 16 (Awards and Benefits) – Let Student-Athletes Catch a Game
When athletes are on the road or required to stay over a break, schools are allowed to keep them occupied. Entertainment is allowed during both road trips and vacation breaks during the season. There is one meaningful difference though: during a vacation break, that entertainment cannot be tickets to a professional sports contest. That means no NBA games for athletes during winter break, or no baseball games for baseball players after school gets out in the summer.

There are already enough controls on entertainment generally (within a certain distance) and controls on professional sports tickets during road games (must come from the institution) to prevent it from being abused during these relatively short times when athletes are stuck on an empty campus. And while it is an advantage to schools near professional teams, the fact that tickets cannot be used in the recruiting process or given during the academic year limits that advantage.

Bylaw 17 (Playing and Practice Seasons) – Basketball Alumni Games
In sports other than football and basketball, alumni contests are a common occurrence. They typically occur during the exhibition season (like during fall baseball) or as a preseason meet before the championship season starts. They are exempt from the limit on the total number of games, and the NCAA recently began allowing athletes to participate in an alumni game and still redshirt that year.

Basketball’s preseason is a bit of a mess right now. One problem was well known: the strict limits on which athletes could play in exhibition games and still redshirt. Another did not pop up until this year as a result of the NBA lockout. NBA players wanted to workout with their old college teams and even play against them, but the NCAA does not exempt alumni games in basketball from the maximum number of competitions or first permissible start date like exhibitions against lower division opponents or closed-door scrimmages.

A framework is there though. Basketball teams get two games that do not count between the first day of practice and the first real game. What those two games can be should expand and whether they count as using a season of competition should be simplified. But an excellent start would be to allow schools that have alumni willing to suit up to use an alumni game as one of their two exhibitions.

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: , ,

Funding Reform

December 15, 2011 by

Unfunded mandates are always controversial. When one government requires another government to spend money it may not have, there is bound to be tension. Proposal 2011–96, which allows schools to provide up to $2,000 beyond the current grant-in-aid limits, is not an unfunded mandate. The key word is allows. The proposal requires schools to do nothing, just permits them to.

But many schools are struggling to see a choice. 2011–96 (and 2011–97, the multi-year grant proposal) allow, in the views of many administrators and coaches in Division I, something so powerful that it must be provided. The fear with competitive equity is not that winning is easier for some schools than others because of money. The fear is that winning will become impossible for some schools based on money. Increased money to student-athletes is expected to be one of the things with that sort of competitive impact. That fear has been turned into enough override requests to suspend 2011–96 at least until the Board of Directors takes another look at the proposal.

The simplest way to address the issues with an unfunded mandate is often to fund it. However, that is often impossible since funding the program (i.e. raising taxes) is often as unpopular as the program might be necessary. But in this case, the Board of Directors could kill not just two but six birds with one stone. Because the mechanism for funding a large grant-in-aid increase is the creation of an FBS football playoff.

Not just any playoff. This would be an NCAA Division I FBS Football Tournament. That means a selection committee. It probably means an RPI of some kind. It could mean a large bracket, although it does not have to. But most importantly, it means the revenue from such a tournament would be distributed by the NCAA.

Only about 40% of the revenue the NCAA distributes to Division I schools is distributed based on competitive success (i.e. winning games in the men’s basketball tournament). The rest is distributed equally (sometimes with strings attached) or based on the number of scholarships a school offers or how many student-athletes receive Pell Grants. Not to mention that the Division I revenue distribution takes up only 60% of the NCAA’s total operating revenue, with the rest spent on the NCAA’s championships, membership services, distributions to Divisions II and III and administrative expenses.

If an FBS tournament generated similar revenue to the Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, there would be to match or even exceed existing Bowl Championship Series payouts while leaving plenty left over to fund the additional scholarship costs. In fact, it would be able to fund the most expensive version of that proposal, where the expense allowance is equal to the full cost-of-attendance and student-athletes on partial scholarships receive an equivalent portion of the stipend.

A funded scholarship increase could potentially solve the following problems:

  • Criticism that the increased aid is not to the full cost-of-attendance. The allowance could more easily be increased to that number without imposing additional costs on cash-strapped universities. Plus mandated reporting through the NCAA’s revenue distribution system allays concerns that the cost-of-attendance calculation might be manipulated.
  • Title IX concerns. If the proposal is broadened to include partial scholarship athletes, then the proportion of aid available to men and women does not change, and football’s 85 full scholarship no longer create a significant Title IX hurdle.
  • Creation of a football playoff. No need for explanation here.
  • Competitive equity impact. In the short term, there is no competitive equity impact, since the scholarship increase is funded for everyone.
  • A new model of competitive equity. In the long term, the existence of an NCAA tournament in football and greater targeted funding of specific costs makes the Board of Directors’ new approach to competitive equity more palatable. In all sports schools would compete against their conference peers to get into a national tournament where they get their shot against the rest of the country.

It also makes a football playoff significantly more likely. Instead of the weighted voting of the Legislative Council, FBS schools would receive one vote each. FBS specific legislation requires 25 requests to start the override process, 50 to suspend legislation, and 75 votes against a proposal if it ultimately comes to that. At that point, the only way an FBS football playoff would not occur would be if a significant majority of schools did not want one.

If this sounds too good to be true, it is admittedly a little oversimplified. It would be hard to tie the existing financial aid proposal to an FBS-only playoff proposal, so you would have two separate proposals. Everything would go back to another override process where the success of one proposal hinges on the success of the other and with only a subset of schools voting on one of the proposals. But the idea solves too many problems to not get at least a “what if” when the Board of Directors meets in January to continue the path to reform.

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: , , , ,

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: , ,
«Older Posts

Copyright �© 2010-2012 NCAA �·