Mr. NCAA

With a quiet manner and a shock of gray-white hair that sometimes falls boyishly toward his eyes, Myles Brand does not look like a man who could move a monolith.

But he dislodged Bob Knight as coach at Indiana when he was the president of the university.

And as president of the NCAA he has turned the association that has ruled college sports for 100 years with a molasses-like bureaucracy into a more nimble organization that is likely to make rules now and work out the details later by making adjustments or granting exceptions.

“We’ve moved away from this bureaucracy that makes rules, end of story,” said Brand, 63, who replaced Cedric Dempsey in 2003. “There will always be waivers.”

It is an era of adjustment and reconsideration, but it is an era of movement, not gridlock.

“I think he has been a breath of fresh air in terms of academic reform, taking stands on race and gender issues -- probably the most controversial issue he tackled that people didn’t think he should have was the Indian mascot issue, but it made it part of the national debate,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida.

The decision last year to ban the use of Native American nicknames and mascots deemed “hostile or abusive” during NCAA postseason tournaments was called “outrageous and insulting” by Florida State President T.K. Wetherell and “a flagrant abuse of power,” by University of North Dakota President Charles E. Kupchella.

The once-rigid NCAA bent, bowing to circumstances such as tribes approving the use of their names, and rescinded the ban on four schools -- including Florida State’s Seminoles and Utah’s Utes -- as it continues to hear appeals.

That issue probably is the most talked-about of Brand’s three years, but his central agenda has been academic reform, as was expected when he became the first university president to head the organization.

Earlier this month, the NCAA announced the first penalties linked to the Academic Progress Rate, resulting in scholarship losses for 99 teams at 65 schools.

But getting to that point required compromise -- such as the NCAA adjusting its formula in response to schools’ complaints their scores were hurt by athletes choosing to leave early for professional careers.

Yet a troubling development emerged with the announcement of the teams affected, with the penalties falling on the have-nots of college athletics.

“We learned that those schools that have the financial wherewithal to provide support for academic achievement do better than whose who are financially challenged and can’t provide that support,” Brand said.

The current crisis related to academics stems from athletes receiving degrees from fraudulent prep schools, as reported by the New York Times and Washington Post.

“The NCAA needs to get its rules in better shape,” Brand said. “In fact, we expect emergency legislation before the end of April.”

Never has the NCAA moved more quickly to change or relax its rules than it did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year, when it announced it would grant broad rules exceptions to athletes and schools affected by the disaster, a move Lapchick called part of the “humanization” of the NCAA.

It remains an organization that faces perpetual challenges, among them financial issues and the latest in a series of antitrust lawsuits, including two brought by groups of former athletes regarding NCAA limits on the number and value of scholarships.

Brand remains focused on what has been called the “arms race” in athletic facilities, leading to expenditures that outstrip the growth of revenue.

A long-term concern is the reliance on the $6-billion CBS contract to televise the NCAA basketball tournament through 2013. Last year, 86% of the NCAA’s nearly $508 million in revenue came from television and marketing rights fees.

“In 2013, I can’t predict what the media will want to do in terms of the way it presents our games and what the alternatives will be to network TV and on-demand television and on-demand cellphones and everything else you can think of,” Brand said.

“We have an uncertain future in terms of where we’re going, and I think it behooves us as managers of the NCAA to make sure we’re prepared for that future and not just count on the same kind of contract.”

Brand has been the president that university presidents wanted.

“I think he’s done a very, very fine job of following the directive and desires of the Division I board of directors,” said Tom Hansen, commissioner of the Pacific 10 Conference, referring to the NCAA presidents. “I think on the campuses some administrators are worried he’s listening too much to the presidents and perhaps not to administrators.”

Some administrators also are concerned Brand goes directly to coaches, drawing praise from Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski, among others, for listening to coaches’ views on issues.

“When you’re the president of the NCAA, everybody has an opinion because you can’t satisfy everyone,” Big East Conference Commissioner Mike Tranghese said. “In my dealings with him, you can tell him what’s on your mind and he will listen.”

Brand also has known what not to bring up, recognizing the independence of college football’s bowl championship series.

“He’s acknowledged from day one the BCS operates outside the NCAA,” Tranghese said. “He has not tried to take it over as some people said he was going to.”

Brand has been quite a different NCAA president from what many imagined when he was widely quoted as saying college sports needed to “turn down the volume” before he was hired. More recently, he is urging the NCAA and its schools to embrace commercialism, as long as the ventures conform to “the mission and values of higher education.”

Princeton Athletic Director Gary Walters praised the approach, saying, “What Myles has done is he’s enhanced the integrity of our organization because he’s closing the gap between what we purport to do and what we actually do.”

Brand is amused that the NCAA, often criticized for being too slow, is sometimes now criticized for acting too quickly. It was much the same at Indiana, where he was criticized for allowing Knight to continue as coach under a “zero tolerance” policy, then criticized for firing him after a confrontation with a student.

Though he almost always declines to respond to questions on Knight with more than a smile, Brand was at Indiana’s NCAA tournament games this month, as Mike Davis, the coach he hired to replace Knight, coached his final games.

“He’s a quiet man, but he’s a powerful man,” Davis said. “Once he makes his mind up about something, he has enough information to go through and back it up.”

That is the quality NCAA staffers identify as well.

“He’s brought a different management style that has profoundly changed how our organization functions,” said Greg Shaheen, the NCAA’s vice president of Division I men’s basketball.

“He’s a trained philosopher. He thinks through things until he’s heard what he needs to make a decision. He doesn’t re-live it. He doesn’t re-digest.

“It has led to decisive action and led to an understanding within the organization that we’re going to make decisions, do the right thing and not feel that change is going to take years.”