Reform Fallout Creates Window for Keeping NCAA Intact with New Division

Significant organizational change usually requires powerful urgency, emerging coalitions and a window of opportunity to move against resistance to change. The last three years of uneven reform efforts by the NCAA built the reform coalition, but its failures fashioned the sense of urgency and window to change NCAA governance with a new division.

The Window of Opportunity

The paradox driving a new Division in the NCAA lies in how the reform failures created the necessary strategic window to mobilize everyone to achieve the long needed action. None of this could have happened without the NCAA Presidents efforts to reform academics, enforcement and rules of the last four years. The uneven pace and above all the Division 1 membership overrides of critical reforms finally exposed the inability of the class riven Division 1 to change it.

Remember the Presidents working with NCAA President Emmert had to go around the NCAA governance structure to pass most of the reforms. They knew real reforms would be stymied by the vetoes and pace of the Confederated NCAA. The Presidents worked through study groups and their Executive Committee that represented each conference.  In short periods of time they passed a set of strong academic, student welfare and enforcement reforms. Some of the best academic reforms and the new structure of coaching accountability along with systematized enforcement penalties go into place in August 2013.

Time and again, if the reforms cost money, the membership of Division 1 rose up and slapped down the changes. This finally revealed the class riven structural inability of the present Division 1 group to do simple justice to student athletes and reform the rulebook.

Keeping the NCAA Intact

This failed effort carved out the window to do what many have known needed to be done for the last ten years—launch a new NCAA division. Leaving the media pundits and SEC aside, most schools never favored seceding from the NCAA but wanted to create a new Division based on wealth and football status. The wealth inequalities had become too great and undermined efforts to simplify rules or get student athletes just stipends. This emerging focus, finally articulated by the super Conference Commissioners, focuses on keeping  the NCAA intact and nestling the super conferences in a different division. It represents a great success for the Presidents and Presidential control. Unlike  athletic directors and media pundits, the Presidents understand the academic dimensions of college sports and preferred to keep the NCAA and Presidential control intact.

The NCAA remains a voluntary professional membership organization with a weak presidential structure divided into three plus divisions each of which sets its own rules. The confederated structure vests power in the vote of the membership. The committees are designed with equal distribution of divisions to ensure that the common rules take into account all the diverse needs of widely diverse schools with different regions, academic and social missions as well as wealth.

Confederated structures are cumbersome and slow;

they are designed that way to elicit consensus and attend to everyone’s concerns. Masticated mush often comes out after four years of effort. But it does keep a strong focus upon student athletes and welfare across all the divisions and does a pretty good job of governing sports and running tournaments. It also does not mean that the same rules apply on all fronts to Division 1 or 3.

Keeping the NCAA intact matters. None of the Presidents and conferences wanted to rebuild the infrastructure or eliminate other sports. The organization does:

•  a great job of running tournaments; 
• a good job of managing rules of the game and adapting changes; 
• a relatively good job of distributing tournament money equitably and encouraging academic integrity; 
• a relatively good job of setting academic standards, attending to racial disparities and diversity issues; 
• an OK job of trying to manage the admissions and qualification processes as well as keeping up with the endless corruptions of the process; 
• a decent job of managing the complex international issues and Olympic and national competition issues involved in college athletics; 
• it does a really good job of day-to-day consulting and staying on top the endless array of NCAA rules and violations that keep endless consulting and conference calls between schools and NCAA on the vast majority of enforcement issues. Enforcement will always be a problem for any self-governing membership organization.

The NCAA awards championships in the following sports:

Baseball Division I Division II Division III Basketball Men's Division I Division II Division III Women's Division I Division II Division III Bowling Cross Country Men's Women's Fencing Field Hockey Football Division I (FCS) Division II Division III

Golf Men's Division I Division II Division III Women's Division I Division II Division III Gymnastics Men's Women's Ice Hockey Men's Women's Lacrosse Men's Women's Rifle Rowing Skiing Soccer Men's Women's

Softball Division I Division II Division III Swimming and Diving Men's Women's Tennis Men's Women's Track and Field Indoor Men's Women's Outdoor Men's Women's Volleyball Men's National Collegiate Division III Women's Water Polo Men's Women's Wrestling

No one has done enforcement well. Historically the NCAA ended up with enforcement because Conferences failed miserably at self-enforcement. Conferences handed it over to the NCAA because they could not successfully make and enforce their own rules without tearing themselves apart over conflict of interest and internecine battles. College athletics is too small a professional world and conferences way too small to achieve self-enforcement model without inherent conflict of interest. At the same time, serious enforcement in a confederated model will always take time and care especially without subpoena powers and when people have an incentive to lie. Whatever the rhetoric, the conferences don’t want and can’t do enforcement.

The new enforcement reforms clarify violation levels and expected punishments for rules violations makes huge progress. Most importantly it should limit discretion for most violations and make penalties more consistent and reliable.  Nothing will eliminate the need for careful, slow and slogging investigations and judgments on major messes. 

The NCAA has and will struggle, as do all self-governing organizations, to create a strong and independent and timely enforcement structure. These challenges will never go away and admit no easy solutions. It is important to remember that without subpoena power and facing incentives to lie, NCAA enforcement will take time and require accountability. The NCAA must get a more professionalized enforcement structure. But no self-governing professional association ever gets it right and will always be adapting and changing over time.

Class Divisions Paralyze Present Division 1

The real issue lies not in tension among divisions but the rift within Division 1. Here football super conference schools benefit from the modern media contracts, even though most still lose money. The five power conferences uneasily coexist with two other groups. The other football schools, usually lumped as mid-majors, do not have great media contracts and will never get them. They hemorrhage money. Even bleeding money, these schools desperately cling to football for reasons of prestige and visibility. They hope to sneak one representative into the major bowls or go to a minor a bowl where they will lose more money. The third Division 1 group encompasses the basketball only schools that fight to be in Division 1 to get access to the NCAA tournament.

Bob Bowlsby, the Commissioner of Big 12 and superb athletic director at Stanford and Iowa, pointed out that the NCAA had made it too easy to get into Division 1. Schools that can barely afford it clamor for the prestige and the NCAA tournaments and bowl access. This increase in size of Division 1 results in a fundamental rift between the super conference football schools—the BCS—and the rest. This rift is directly responsible for the incomplete reforms.

The mid major football schools and most basketball only schools oppose reforms and innovations that would cost more money. Reform efforts to mandate summer school and transition programs for at risk athletes were voted down because of cost consideration but glossed as academic freedom. One of the straws that broke the camel’s back lay in the override vote on class lines Division 1 that voted down the simple justice of providing cost of attendance stipends to college athletes. People pretended it was about  academic freedom issues and complaints about not having worked out all the glitches with Pell Grants, it really resulted in straight up class warfare where the have-nots and barely haves resist all student welfare and many academic reforms that would cost money and increase their perpetual deficits. The obsession with limiting cost and equalizing the playing field paralyze real reform for student welfare or rule simplification.

The second logic of this class split plays out in an obsession with rules designed to equalize the playing field. The excess of NCAA rules grows from two sources. First, many seek to avoid the grotesque special treatments that coaches pushed to recruit student athletes such as private jet rides, lavish gifts, clubbing, girls or banquets that undermined a legitimate and ongoing attempt to emphasize the student, not just the athlete. These will remain and as schools deregulate, they will return.

The other driver to proliferate minutiae rules comes from a fixation by less well off schools to minimize the advantages in recruiting student athletes by the richer schools. These can range from limits on meal expenditures, to limits on travel or to rein in boosters—remember in the fifties boosters just paid for students tuition and board on their own—to limits upon the amount of paper and size of books. Even attempts to deregulate communication with high school athletes failed here. The arcane and minute rules about level playing fields resulted from salutary desire to minimize arms race costs, but mainly to protect some chance to compete for student athletes by less rich schools.

This lead to the endless proliferation of rules; some make sense such as limits on gifts or booster access; some are just crazy such as communication limits. The reality is that great student athletes go to the top programs to win and compete. They follow the best coaches and the best chances to compete at highest level, get media exposure and win championships and in some cases prepare to become professional athletes. No amount of minutia tying up phone call limits will change these realities.  Yet this attempt to tie down the giants, as results in endless rules, more cost and fails as Gulliver’s Lilliputians learned.

Creating a new division will not solve all these issues. There will exist the cleavage between the superrich—Ohio State and Texas—the rich Michigan, North Carolina, USC—and the not really rich, Mississippi State, Washington State. But all the schools will have a reasonable chance to compete given the lifeline of TV football contracts.

New Division and Presidential Control

Keeping it in the NCAA also keeps the Presidents in charge. In the last two years, athletic directors using media contacts have waged a covert campaign to paint Presidents as too far away and out of it. Sometimes this is the case, but Presidents are actually responsible for educational institutions and keeping an educational component alive in sports; athletic directors only do so if driven by Presidents. The Presidents will keep control, hire and fire athletic directors, and attempt to keep an academic component in the world of athletics. Student athletes enter as students and the greatest long-term obligation of schools is to educate the 90,000 who graduate each year and do not become professional athletes not just focus about the 450 possible professionals the media cares about.

I want to make one point clear. The college presidents drive reforms, not the athletic directors. No major academic reforms and no major reform movements ever came from athletic directors. It is not they are bad guys, most are honorable and hard working, but they labor under intense short terms pressures to make money and create winners. They are not hired as educators and their incentives undermine that mission. Even when committed to student welfare and education, any reform that adds to complexity, requires more investment and means more accountability will be questioned. For some the academic component feels like a bother.

The paradox of the present moment of change lies in how the window of opportunity grew from both the successes—academic standards, graduation rates and higher penalties for lower graduation rates—and failures that manifest the intractable intransigence of the Division 1 have-nots. This window exposes the present form of Division 1 as a failed government approach. It needs to be reconfigured with a new division to transcend the class resistance to academic and simple justice reforms. If the NCAA membership as a whole does not respond to the legitimate concerns of the power conferences and the Presidents, it will fail as an institution.

The Precarious World of College Coaches and ADs

As I reflect on the new year I can’t help but think about the 25 college football coaches who changed jobs at the end of last year. About 20 were fired, and the rest moved to new jobs. The coaching slaughter at D1 athletics occurs annually. Sometimes it is richly deserved as with Bobby Petrino for his scurrilous lying and cheating at Arkansas. This year we learned elite college coaches now only have two years to turn around programs with Jon Embree at Colorado. Sometimes it ends a fine career as with Ted Tedford’s ten years at Cal. This predictable year-end carnage got me to thinking of how brutal college athletics leadership has become, and how insecure the tenure is for the senior elite college athletic leaders—coaches and athletic directors. I believe this  remarkable insecurity helps drive  the craziness of recruiting, cheating and salaries in elite college sports.

To get some perspective I thought over my almost eight years serving as a faculty athletic representative in the Pacific 10/12 conference. While my numbers may not be perfect based upon faulty memory, here is the carnage of the 10 original Pac 10 schools over that 8-year period:

Athletic Directors            21

Football Coaches            22

Basketball Coaches         24

30 leadership positions associated with revenue sports—67 personnel changes—200+ percent turnover.

The PAC 10/12 is a destination conference; most leave involuntarily. Only six left voluntarily, one to be a college vice president and one to be a conference commissioner, 2 to the NFL and 1 to the NBA. The rest left under duress. Athletic directors and head football and basketball coaches do not get fired or hired these days without the involvement of the college presidents.  This means all these firings involved the complicity of the President and often regents of the university.

NCAA President Mark Emmert dislikes the locution “business of college athletics,” so do I. Maybe the "enterprise of college athletics?" Not sure, but no words can hide the brittle brutal reality that coaches and athletic directors get fired if they do not win. Winning brings revenue and prestige and can temporarily satisfy insatiable boosters. As I learned, it does not matter how many students you graduate; it almost does not matter how many minor or line skirting violations you have, unless you bring horrible scandal to the university. The reality and incentives for coaches and athletic directors are clear—Win. 

Commentators scream and bemoan the cheating and legal shading and excessive rules of the NCAA. But this constellation is all connected. Coaches and athletic director must win. They know that and despite the rhetoric, little else matters. The frantic drive to win and win fast and continue winning, drives the obsession with recruiting. It drives the obsession with keeping student athletes happy once they arrive. It drives the fixation on high salaries to get the best coaching talent, but also the knowledge of the coach that they can be fired in an instant even for a winning season.  These drives are fed by possessive, obsessive and over-involved boosters who pay for the bloated salaries and new facilities as well as sponsor the skirting of the rules outside of the boundaries of the program. The inordinate power of the boosters also accounts for how little time coaches now have to build programs and how little leeway they have to have a bad season or two.  Even as astoundingly successful coach as Chip Kelly at Oregon finds himself on the outs with boosters because he does not kowtow to their whims.

This win or nothing environment and the reality that a coach or AD can go from hero to pariah in three months shapes the environment that molds coaches and athletic directors.

We all know how tightly strung modern college coaches are. These are not laid back guys; they are driven competitors and hate to lose as much as they love to win.  We see them go off like volcanoes on the sideline sometimes against their own players or assistants. At practices they can sometimes seem almost maniacal in their intensity and demands on 19 year olds. Most morph into unbelievable control freaks focusing upon micro-managing details, recruiting and games. We can watch the living archetype with Nick Saban at Alabama and see the costs of it with what happened with Urban Meyer when he had to take a sabbatical from the game to protect his health and sanity.

We need to remember that coaches are human beings, and most of them stay in college because they love working with student athletes and helping athletes grow as people as well as players. They enter coaching as driven, smart and passionate human beings. But the ultra competitive and hair trigger firing environment shapes them in ways most of them would not choose to grow. Professional sports goes through coaches at a relentless rate; the day after the end of the 2012 NFL season 7 head coaches and 5 general managers were fired. But NFL teams make no pretense to educate, care for and help young men grow. Sadly most college coaches really do care about helping their student athletes grow as humans as well as players, but they also know they are not rewarded for the quality of humanity they instill in their students.

We can bemoan a lot of this, and it has always been with us. Go back forty or fifty years and the same problems existed, the same obsessions and the same corruptions. There was less money and less TV exposure, but college sports, like most things in life, never had a time of innocence.

The point I want to make here is that to a considerable extent the behavior of coaches and athletic directors is shaped by the precarious demands of their jobs and the signals sent to them about winning as the absolute priority. Even worse all the coaches see that moral sluggards like Bobby Petrino gets hired by whomever it was that hired him. 

Despite the craziness most coaches still coach. In most college sports they receive decent pay and graduate students and love their job, their sports and their student athletes. Even at the crazed elite levels of the revenue sports you still can see this shine through in quiet moments or early time before practice or team meetings. But the players are not stupid, they are 19-22 years old, but they know their coaches are on the firing line and they feel their own responsibility when a coach gets fired.

I want to make clear that the problem here ultimately lies with the Presidents and the boosters whom they serve. Every coach who has been fired knows what it is like to be a hero one day and a nonperson the next, wiped out of the history and marketing of the university as thoroughly as Orwell would wipe someone out in 1984.

The good Presidents know they are complicit and feel trapped, riding a tiger of revenue and passion they cannot ultimately control. Most Presidents have far more important and deeper issues to attend to than college athletics, but it takes an inordinate amount of their time and accounts for most of the press their universities receive. Few like or enjoy this, yet they continue to clamor to join Division 1A athletics and football even knowing the costs and losses.

I believe this anger and fear over being trapped accounts for much of the energy driving the Presidents for modern reform. They may never get the TV money monster under control, but they know they have to try. The changes in high school requirements, progress towards degree, the penalties of APR and the new attempts to deny access of NCAA championships tied to graduation rates all create cumulative vectors to redirect some of the coaches’ energy towards education and graduation of students. It also motivates athletic directors to invest more money in academic and student support.

But here again, even as they struggle to inflect academics back into the equations and change the incentive structure for coaches, we know that some president somewhere will reliably hire a moral failure like Bobby Petrino to coach again or that John Caliperi with two vacated championships will be hired again.

At this time of pressure and absurdity, the coaches face pressures and firing windows that exist in no other industry. Yet they stay in. The vast majority live almost nomadic lives moving from team to team when staffs are fired or they have a chance to move up. But the vast majority still care about the student athletes. They still struggle to teach about life along with sport; about learning along with winning.

These leaders live in a toxic system sustained by world class educators. Some make huge salaries, most make good salaries with very unstable and nomadic lives.  They coach from passion and joy in their sport and loyalty to their students. The incentives of the elite level and their putative academic leaders often erode this, but they carry on. I salute them.