roadkill
Helluva Engineer
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There’s been some mention in other threads about NCAA activity, or lack of, with respect to the changes taking place in football lately. I was curious about what might actually be happening behind the scenes so I did a bit of research.
The NCAA, despite some comments otherwise, isn’t going away anytime soon and still wants to have a say in the direction things take for D1 football in the future. People often think of the NCAA as some nebulous (and relatively powerless) third-party bureaucratic rule-making entity wanting solely to protect its revenue, when they are actually a proxy for the collective intentions of the leadership of its member schools and conferences. (I suppose both can be true, lol.) While they can be faulted for not getting ahead of the NIL issue and moving too slowly to adapt, they are still taking the changes very seriously. At its core, the NCAA understands the need for relative competitive balance in order to maintain a high level of fan engagement and thus maximize revenues. The NCAA has tended to be reactive in nature throughout its history; the current situation is no different.
If you’ve ever served on a committee whose members came from totally different organizations with no clear chain of command or consensus, you will understand why they move slowly. At any rate, they have a new committee this year called the Division I Transformation Committee. It is comprised of a cross-section of college presidents, ADs, and conference commissioners. Their regular meetings since January have produced reports which indicate the areas of focus and the direction of their thinking going forward. Some highlights and my own interpretation of the most recent report (link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ncaaorg/committees/d1/transform/May2022D1TR_Apr18May3May10Minutes.pdf ) are:
The NCAA, despite some comments otherwise, isn’t going away anytime soon and still wants to have a say in the direction things take for D1 football in the future. People often think of the NCAA as some nebulous (and relatively powerless) third-party bureaucratic rule-making entity wanting solely to protect its revenue, when they are actually a proxy for the collective intentions of the leadership of its member schools and conferences. (I suppose both can be true, lol.) While they can be faulted for not getting ahead of the NIL issue and moving too slowly to adapt, they are still taking the changes very seriously. At its core, the NCAA understands the need for relative competitive balance in order to maintain a high level of fan engagement and thus maximize revenues. The NCAA has tended to be reactive in nature throughout its history; the current situation is no different.
If you’ve ever served on a committee whose members came from totally different organizations with no clear chain of command or consensus, you will understand why they move slowly. At any rate, they have a new committee this year called the Division I Transformation Committee. It is comprised of a cross-section of college presidents, ADs, and conference commissioners. Their regular meetings since January have produced reports which indicate the areas of focus and the direction of their thinking going forward. Some highlights and my own interpretation of the most recent report (link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ncaaorg/committees/d1/transform/May2022D1TR_Apr18May3May10Minutes.pdf ) are:
- We have too many nitpicky rules and poor enforcement of them (duh). Let’s reduce the number of rules (some obvious low-hanging fruit here in the area of SA impermissible benefits) and enhance our ability to enforce what’s left. There is a lot of effort going into incentivizing infractions reporting and streamlining the penalties and process improvements to improve timeliness, as well as enhancing the “pain” level of penalties. There was mention of possibly tying financial penalties to the budget of the institution penalized (looking at you, Texas A&M), as well as focusing more on penalizing coaches rather than impacting SAs.
- The word-salad topic “Impact of Financial Aid Team Limits on Competitive Equity in Equivalency Sports” explores what existing regulatory concepts the NCAA could use to enhance competitive parity given today’s NIL landscape. Scholarship limits are a variable that has traditionally been used as a guardrail against stockpiling the best players. Now that NIL has undercut that concept to some degree, what’s left in this area – well, we still have roster limits. So, this may be an area that gets tweaked. I’m not seeing how this will be very effective, though, unless it’s some draconian reduction to approach NFL-like limits. I don’t see that happening as it will be viewed by some as reducing opportunities for SAs.
- Recruiting is an area of focus for reform (and is clearly the most contentious area as far as many coaches are concerned). Reform concepts include simplifying and possibly reducing the span of the allowed recruiting periods. Surprisingly, it mentioned (and to me, this seems anti-competitive) the complete removal of most coaching staff definitions and counting rules. I wonder if this is an acknowledgment that some programs have huge “non-coaching” staff for recruiting and it’s impossible to enforce limits? Also, while the NCAA has a stated rule against using NIL as a recruiting inducement, I didn’t see any mention of specific enforcement enhancements for this rule, which would be a key to solving this problem. Is this the elephant in the room that everyone sees, but no one wants to discuss?
- They’ve included inputs from a committee of student-athletes. Notable is the recommendation: “The SAAC members noted that national championships and competitive excellence currently unify Division I and should continue to unify the division moving forward.”
