ANALYSIS : NCAA Fighting to Avoid Extinction

The collegiate athletic torture chamber known as the NCAA convention began in earnest here Monday.

Gathered together in a room as big as two football fields, in a hotel as big as two dozen football stadiums, about 2,000 people sat in attendance. These are the men and women who administer college sports as we know them today. In the next four days, they will attempt to take this massive organization forward. Realistically speaking, that will be like a tugboat pulling the Titanic.

The convention program is a book of 227 pages. The organization is hoping to act on 119 proposals. One of the proposals has 17 amendments. There are committees and sub-committees. There are even sub-committees to the sub-committees. There are procedural concerns, by-law concerns, advisory groups and advisers to the advisory groups. To be here is to understand the term gobbledygook.

And yet, out of this massive meeting of diverse minds, interests and hidden agendas must come some movement, some direction that is really progress and not just more sports-speak from former jocks and coaches in suit coats. In other words, the Titanic must steam forward. Maybe quite a bit.

The NCAA is troubled. As Executive Director Dick Schultz said in his state-of-the-association address Monday, “I said a year ago that we are what we are perceived to be. And I’m afraid that in the last year, that perception has not improved as much as we would have liked.”

Bluntly put, the public thinks that the NCAA has lost control of its athletic programs, that its inaction or ineffective action has triggered an inability to keep schools from cheating and athletes from becoming students only of games.

So the organization, with Schultz tooting the horn on the tugboat, has identified its shortcomings, has even been publicly candid about them in a vast departure from the days when Walter Byers was its leader, and decided to push hard toward reform.

But there is a difference. This time, standing alongside Schultz, are college presidents, the same people to whom a concerned public has cried out in other years to be leaders. Until recently, those cries have fallen on deaf ears.

“If I’m the CEO of any organization, I want to be very hands-on about something that is a central issue in my company,” said Mike Gilleran, commissioner of the West Coast Conference. “But for years, college presidents didn’t respond this way. That created a kind of ivory-tower image, where it looked like these guys were just sitting up there, not knowing anything about what was really going on, and flipping coins to make their decisions.”

Gilleran made the point that, were a Nobel Prize-winning professor to leave a university, the stir caused among alumni would be nowhere near that of the departure of a championship-winning football or basketball coach.

Chuck Young, chancellor of UCLA, agrees.

“I think that intercollegiate athletics is a very useful American phenomenon, but it is also very pervasive,” Young said. “Look at the number of pages in your sports section and the amount of time devoted to sports on television. It’s where our society is, and we can’t change that. So administrating that becomes an extremely important part of what a university does.”

Young has become one of the most active and vocal members of the NCAA’s Presidents Commission, a group of 44 college presidents from Divisions I, II and III that has taken on the mandate of giving the NCAA new credibility and workability.

Or, maybe of saving it.

College presidents have tried before. In the mid-1980s, they influenced cost-cutting changes, upgraded academic admission standards and even put more teeth into penalties with a so-called “death penalty” for repeat offender schools.

But at a special summer session called in 1987 in Dallas, when more cost-cutting and paring down all-around were main agenda items, they ran into a brick wall in the person of Bo Schembechler, then the football coach and athletic director at Michigan.

Schembechler, widely known among sports fans and football officials for his ability to cut to the quick, made a number of public pronouncements disapproving of the cutbacks. And in the end, the convention delegates, apparently feeling that Bo knows, cut way back on the cutbacks.

“We have had some stops and starts in this,” Young said. “That year, I would say, was a stop.”

Now, once again, the Presidents Commission has a start. Actually, more like a full head of steam. This week’s convention is labeled the “reform convention.” The huge agenda of proposals includes cutbacks in coaching hours, assistant coaches, length of seasons, length of recruiting periods, etc. The NCAA sees this as sort of a Branch Rickey convention, where they will try to add by subtraction.

It may be that this particular push by the college presidents could also represent a last gasp by the NCAA, as it is currently constructed.

Young said, “The best place to bring about changes in college athletics, at the moment, is the NCAA.”

Asked about the at the moment phrase, Young said that he did not use it frivolously.

“I see this current push as needing to bring change,” he said. “Because if it doesn’t, there may be some individual universities and groups of universities that could take unilateral and multilateral action outside the NCAA.”

Young said that so many schools have different standards and different agendas that, were the NCAA not to clean up its act effectively and quickly, there is a very real possibility that schools such as those in the Pac-10 and Big Ten, along with some selected independents, could join forces and create some policies of their own outside the arm of the NCAA.

Young stopped short of saying he was talking about secession, but seemed to be hinting at a situation in which the NCAA would become more honorary and less functional for certain clusters of universities with similar sizes and problems.

“Everything we seem to try to do at these meetings is to achieve a level playing field,” Young said. “But the reality is that that field isn’t level. And the sad thing is that, when you attempt to legislate for that level playing field, you end up legislating for the lowest common denominator.”

Young, of course, was speaking of intangibles. The specifics of any school, or group of schools, cutting the umbilical cord of the NCAA, is almost more complex and mind-boggling than one of the sessions at this convention.

Still, the CEO of a major university with one of the top athletic programs in the country, was hinting at a day and time when the NCAA, as we know it today, may not be.

To put it another way, if there aren’t some substantial moves made here this week, the Titanic of collegiate athletics may be heading toward an iceberg.