NCAA Forum: Coaches Win Couple of Big Ones

The agenda was understood to call for cutbacks, cost containment, a move toward sanity, putting athletics back in proper balance with academics on campuses across the country. Chancellors and presidents showing the coaches who’s boss by passing some specific legislation.

Oh, yeah?

So what kind of legislation came out of this National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s special convention called by the Presidents Commission?

Well, as a result of some lobbying by Kentucky Coach Eddie Sutton and North Carolina State Coach Jim Valvano, the delegates on Tuesday reconsidered a cut that they had made at the annual convention last January and voted to bring back the two basketball scholarships they had cut in both the men’s and women’s programs.

The Pacific 10’s proposal to cut football scholarships in Division I-A from a total of 95 to 90 was not tabled, but defeated, after the convention heard from Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne and Penn State Coach Joe Paterno.

The Presidents Commission’s own proposal for across-the-board cuts in all the non-revenue sports for both men and women was attacked by University of Oregon President Paul Olum as “unconscionable” and “disgraceful” because of the effect it would have in reducing women’s scholarships by a greater percentage than men’s, and it was postponed indefinitely.

A Presidents Commission proposal to cut Division I-A football coaching staffs by one assistant was attacked by Brigham Young Coach Lavell Edwards, president of the American Football Coaches Assn., and eventually referred back to the Commission until after a study, approved by resolution, that will look at the coaching staffs of all Division I sports.

The delegation also approved studies suggested by the Presidents Commission on financial aid limitations, recruiting, freshman eligibility and academic progress.

And although many of the high-profile, most hard-hitting cuts were avoided all together, some cuts were made.

The NCAA Council’s proposal to cut back playing and practice seasons to a maximum of 26 weeks--a proposal that had Olympic-sport lobbyists in a panic--was finally passed, but not before it was amended 11 times to exclude individual sports and exclude the summer. In other words, swimmers and gymnasts will be able to continue working out with their coaches all year, as always.

Another proposal put forward by the Presidents Commission, a move to cut back on spring practice, passed by a close roll call vote (109-102) but only after an amendment that softened it a little. The amendment left the span in which practice could take place at 36 days, instead of cutting it back to 30. But the vote did specify that only 15 of the 20 practice sessions could involve contact.

Again, not exactly earth-shaking. And, as Michigan Coach Bo Schembechler had said the day before: “If I were a professor, I’d scream for academic freedom. I know when to put on pads--but I’m not going to fight you on everything.”

Also passed were amendments to cut the total number of visits a school may pay for to get recruits to their campuses from 95 to 85 for football and from 18 to 15 for basketball.

Division I-AA managed to cut one assistant football coach, and Division II cut football scholarships from 45 to 40.

All in all, much ado about nothing.

Rev. John Loughlan, president of Loyola Marymount, was not the only delegate leaving the massive meeting room Tuesday afternoon with the sense of having wasted his time. There was a lot of grumbling.

Loughlan had announced, on the floor of the convention while he argued for the cut in basketball scholarships, that he was “discouraged by all the moving back and forth.”

On his way out, he told reporters: “I’ll be surprised if you don’t ridicule not only the organization but all the presidents who either attended or sent delegates here for two days--for what?”

Dick Schultz, the Virginia athletic director and the man who will succeed Walter Byers as the next executive director of the NCAA, took the opposite approach in telling reporters how they would summarize the convention.

Schultz said: “You people will look at this as not being effective. . . . But I think the forum got off to a real good start, much better than some people thought. I thought there were a lot of positive things.

“What I heard was not that people didn’t want to make cuts, but that they didn’t want to go too fast and make mistakes. They want to wait for the studies.

“I heard them saying, ‘Let’s look at other ways to save money rather than taking away from the student-athlete.’ ”

That’s what Valvano was saying.

Valvano took the popular stance that cuts should be made, but not in scholarships. Not cuts that would save money by also cutting opportunities, often for minority students.

Outside the hall, with the TV cameras rolling, Valvano said: “We can save money by cutting things rather than people. We can save money by who we play, where we play, when we play, how we get to where we play, where we stay when we get there. . . . There are other options.”

Valvano and Sutton were big attractions.

Loughlan also said: “It seems like the coaches’ voices came up somehow this time. And they were heard.”

True. Although there were no delegates here by virtue of being coaches, there were a handful here who were both coaches and athletic directors (such as Texas A&M;’s Jackie Sherrill) and some because they were representing the coaches’ organizations (Sutton, for example, who is president of the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches).

They were not heard in January.

But the coaches and the women’s interests and the Olympic sports backers have learned how to lobby.

After the proposal to cut scholarships in “non-revenue” sports was defeated, University of Texas Women’s Athletic Director Donna Lopiano gave a slow smile and said: “We did our work in advance. . . . Of all the proposals, that one got the most press. The Women’s Sports Foundation helped there.”

And she added: “I think that Proposal 18 was made with the best intentions. I don’t think they knew how discriminatory it was, or they never would have proposed it. But that’s why we need to take more time and study these things before we rush into legislation.”

Mikki Flowers of Old Dominion, who was on the committee that drafted the legislation that sought to limit playing and practice seasons, admitted that there were a lot of concessions made along the way and even more made during the passing of the 11 amendments.

“It was never our intention to impede the Olympic effort,” Flowers said. “We knew it needed further study and debate. But to make the concession to exclude the summer--that was most dramatic. It would have had a whole lot of teeth if the summer had been included.

“What we were trying to do was relieve the pressure on the athlete, to help protect the student-athlete.”

And talk about last-second lobbying. . . . Sutton talked to enough delegates over the lunch break to make a big difference. During the morning session, after the chair had ruled a motion to reconsider the basketball scholarship question out of order, the motion to overrule the chair was defeated by 7 votes. In the afternoon, the same motion won by 27 votes and the motion to put the total number of scholarships back at 15 won by 40 votes.

But Sutton said: “It was just a matter of making them them understand that the basketball coaches need to know how many scholarships they’re working with this fall. I think we would have gone back from 13 to 15 next January, anyway. This was just the right thing to do.”

In making a case for reconsidering the basketball scholarship question, it was argued that it was not really an increase in scholarships, but a maintenance of number because the legislation, passed last January, had not yet gone into effect.

Yet despite the lack of wide-scale cuts, and even in view of the loss of ground on the cut already made in basketball scholarships, Byers said the convention should not be viewed as a defeat for the Presidents Commission.

“Not at all,” Byers said. “It was, from the outset, a resounding success.”

He was most pleased with the way the forum, the program of national debate that began Monday with the speech by Cal Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman and will continue for 18 months, got under way, noting that the issues will not “shrivel and go away.”

Byers admitted that the actual legislation passed here won’t help many budgets, but he suggested that the legislation referred to study might lead to cost-cutting legislation.

Byers said: “The issues have not been laid to rest.”