Move Is On to Thin Out Division I : NCAA Committee Proposes Requirements to Restrict Membership

Tom Hansen, commissioner of the Pacific-10 Conference, once watched tears come to the eyes of a university president as the man pleaded for his school to remain in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s Division I, the big time of college sports.

“This is the type of emotion we are dealing with,” Hansen told a group of several hundred athletic directors in Anaheim Monday.

The issue at hand is the swollen membership of Division I, which stands at 293 schools, 291 of which play Division I basketball. The prevailing sentiment among the members--and particularly among the big-budget, high-profile schools--is that some of the fringe schools operating a bare-bones program simply must go.

“There’s no question about that,” Hansen said. “There is currently great disparity in Division I, where there are programs with 25 to 30 sports and a $15-million budget, and those that don’t average a minimum of six sports and have budgets of less than $1 million.”

Hansen, a member of an NCAA restructuring committee that is studying a range of issues including Division I membership, made his remarks at the Anaheim convention of the National Assn. of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, a professional organization that has no governing powers.

Hansen painted a picture of a Division I membership that includes scores of schools that award minimal scholarships to athletes in sports such as track and field, schools that rarely send competitors to NCAA championships and an astoundingly high number of schools--102--that average fewer than 2,500 in home basketball attendance.

The ability to compete in Division I basketball--thus having a shot at the financial rewards of the NCAA tournament--is considered the major lure of Division I.

“You really have to question whether they should be voting with North Carolina, Syracuse and Michigan,” Hansen said.

The NCAA restructuring committee, chaired by Fred Jacoby, Southwest Conference commissioner, has proposed a set of requirements to make Division I membership more restrictive, among them:

--Minimum scholarship levels.

--Minimum average basketball attendance levels, possibly 2,500.

--Minimum qualifiers for NCAA championships over several years.

Those are criteria that are threatening to some schools, but the proposals drew minimal argument Monday, probably because they could not come up for a vote before 1991, and still face several obstacles before making it onto a ballot.

There also is the logic offered by several athletic directors in attendance: How can you expect segments of the membership to vote themselves out?

“We’re not worried about it at this time,” said Cal State Fullerton Athletic Director Ed Carroll, whose only concern among the criteria was the minimum attendance. Fullerton averages well under 4,000 for basketball.

As part of an effort to entice fringe schools to move to Division II, Hansen said he proposes allowing Division II schools to be considered for the NCAA tournament, as well as enhancing the Division II tournament with financial or television guarantees.