NCAA Convention Took Steps for Student-Athletes

Early in the NCAA convention last week in Dallas, University of Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne stood before a College Football Association meeting and laid out the details of a committee report he chaired on the needs of the athlete.

He presented six proposals that he said would better the lives of college football players. He said starting with the elimination of $15 per month laundry money from athletic scholarships in the early 1970s, the players have taken the brunt of cost-cutting measures.

One of Osborne’s more controversial proposals said that 10 percent of $75 million in bowl money should be directed to a fund that would give football players a $75 per month stipend.

Osborne was concerned that his cost-conscious colleagues would not go along with a move that added more expenditure and also smacked of paying players, even if the amount of money involved was almost minuscule in view of the millions of dollars in television money and gate receipts generated by football and basketball.

But as the convention got into its full swing, it became obvious his concern for the welfare of the athlete was not a voice in the wilderness.

A few hours after Osborne asked the CFA membership to try to understand his position for aiding the players, NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz delivered a state of the NCAA address calling for a new model for intercollegiate athletics, one based on mutual trust, doing what is right for the athlete and including a number of cost-reduction ideas.

By its end on Wednesday, Schultz was able to proclaim the tumultuous session as “The Convention of the Student-Athlete.”

Though Osborne’s $75 a month plan was not on the agenda for consideration at this convention, the delegates did pass a number of controversial proposals that NCAA officials believe will be a major step in reforming college athletics and helping the athletes. Among other moves, the delegates:

--Modified the controversial Proposition 42 to allow need-based institutional aid for athletes who failed to qualify for eligibility as a freshman. Under the old rule, the athletes would have had to pay their way as freshman, a proposal that drew the wrath of Georgetown Coach John Thompson and led to his boycott of two games last year. He felt the proposal was racially biased because it denied access to education to economically deprived athletes, many of them minorities.

--Reduced time demands on athletes by cutting back the basketball season by three games and shortening preseason basketball practice and spring football practice.

--Extended testing for steroids year-round with harsher penalties for any positive NCAA-administered drug test.

“You stop and look at the things that were passed ... (such as) summer school aid (for incoming freshmen) ... graduation rates providing information to student-athletes, reduction of practice time, scholarships for walk-ons (after two years in football), broken-time payments (for athletes competing on national teams and) transportation between terms,” Schultz said. “I don’t know of another convention the number of years I’ve been going -- and that’s a good number of years -- that so many positive things have happened on the part of the student-athlete.

“It sends out a very strong message and one that deserves more than just a passing interest.”

Not everyone was totally happy. In a news conference last week, Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight complained that the NCAA still had not addressed the financial needs of many Division I basketball players, and his thoughts were echoed by some colleagues.

The convention also highlighted the turf war between the university presidents, who set the reform policies, and the athletic directors, who must pay the bills. Schultz will continue to be the man in the middle, getting pressure from both sides. But he also said he believes there will be intervention from other quarters if the NCAA fails to act.

“The positive thing out of all this,” Schultz said, “is that there is now within the membership a very strong and urgent feeling that we must reform, that we need some change, and what took place (Tuesday) is a very positive step in that direction. While you might debate how substantial that change was, it’s the procedure that took place, the fact that the Presidents Commission has, I think, gained the momentum, and those people have to be involved if there is going to be major reform.”

Cost reduction and restructuring, as well as reducing time demands on athletes in sports other than football and basketball, are expected to be the major focus of the 1991 convention in Nashville. Both those areas are being studied by committees.

Gene Corrigan, commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, chairs a committee on cost reduction. He said his committee already has decided that a scholarship should be worth the cost of education, an improvement over the current room, board, books and tuition. That might include compensation to athletes for transportation, for all school supplies and other minor expenses.

Yet, before the Presidents Commission can tackle new areas of reform, there is the matter of making certain the latest ones are not weakened in the interim.

“There’s a strong likelihood that some of the progress achieved by the Presidents Commission proposals stands a reasonable chance of being further amended and watered down before it’s effective date in 1992,” said Shelly Steinbach, general counsel for the Washington-based American Council on Education and a convention observer.

“In the absence of an even better lobbying effort in the year ahead,” he said, “it’s unlikely they’ll be able to hold the gains already made or to achieve further reforms. I may be overly pessimistic, but it seemed to me the various forces against reform are highly organized and constitute a very potent force at NCAA conventions ... There were people there who think we went too far already.”

Publicly, the athletic directors say they resent the presidents’ getting involved in the minute details of managing athletic policies.

Bernie Sliger, president of Florida State University and incoming Division I chairman of the Presidents Commission, acknowledged, “we might be getting a little too specific.” He also indicated the Presidents Commission would be consulting leading athletic administrators in the future.

Sliger said the bottom-line figure won’t be known until cost-reduction proposals have been voted on, probably next January. He suggested that cost-containment must be observed, but said some of the projected loss in revenues could be passed on to the consumer, by charging higher student athletic fees and raising ticket prices. He also suggested the possibility of state subsidization in some cases.

The Presidents Commission also will study freshman eligibility, but Schultz calls eliminating it “a quick fix, and that’s not going to do it.”

The convention did consider a resolution from the Division I men’s basketball committee for the NCAA Council to study the issue and come back with a proposal for basketball next season. It was rejected by four votes.

But Schultz sees reform coming ever so slowly. “It’s not a short-term project,” he said.

He also indicated he tailored his state of the NCAA address the way he did because “I just felt in my own mind that the engine was running in the wrong direction and was a little out of control ... Perceptions have to be changed, and we’re at the point the only way you can change the perception is to change the model.”