Brand Seeks to Renew Sports’ Integrity

NCAA President Myles Brand applauded college presidents for firing coaches for behaving badly and called on schools to hire more minority coaches and administrators.

Brand told delegates at the NCAA Convention on Sunday he wanted to reassert the integrity and value of college sports.

He warned that Division I schools, as well as those in Divisions II and III, are vulnerable to being too much like pro franchises by allowing athletics to become separate from the rest of the university.

“Advocating for the value of intercollegiate athletics ... has been made more difficult by several high-profile cases this past year,” Brand said. “These cases involve high-visibility coaches acting badly, though there continue to be instances of student-athletes and even presidents failing to abide by the standards of propriety.”

Brand didn’t give any specific examples, but several have been well documented.

Last spring, Alabama President Robert Witt fired new head football coach Mike Price after he admitted drinking heavily and visiting a strip club.

Rick Neuheisel was fired at Washington for taking part in an off-campus NCAA basketball pool.

Brand, in his second year as president, also touched on academic reform and said the NCAA needs to be more flexible in interpreting rules and granting waivers.

Brand said university presidents should be the leaders in balancing academic integrity and athletic success, and firing coaches for inappropriate behavior is a good start.

The lack of minority coaches is receiving more attention. Only four of the 117 football head coaches in Division I-A last season were black, and Brand said he believes flaws in schools’ searches “make it difficult or impossible for new talent to rise to the top.”

“That is unacceptable, especially given that a large portion of the student-athletes who participate on these teams are African American,” he said.

Brand warned of changes in collegiate programs if profit becomes more important than education.

“Intercollegiate athletics is not a freestanding, wholly autonomous enterprise.... We have seen the type of drift to the professional model that will diminish, and in the long run will eliminate the value of the program to its university,” Brand said.