NCAA panel reimagining college athletics model lacks any current D-I athletes

Status quo. Unimaginative. Tone deaf. Choose your own characterization for the composition of the now 28-member NCAA Constitution Committee that is charged in the coming months with reimagining the college athletics model.

“The NCAA is one big hot mess and has been for the last 12 years,” Jay Bilas, the ESPN analyst, told On3 in an overarching characterization of the beleaguered association.

Regarding the committee, Bilas called for “radical change of the (NCAA’s) illegal policies, and you’re not going to do that by having the people who put the illegal policies in place and kept them in place for all this time sort of decide the course going forward. I’m not confident that we’re going to have substantial and positive change with the same people making decisions. But this is an organization that keeps failed leaders in place forever. There’s a failed leader at the top of the NCAA in Mark Emmert. What do you expect?”

Jason Stahl, a former University of Minnesota professor who is the founder and executive director of the College Football Players Association, called the committee’s makeup completely out of touch with the changes in college sports. In the past year, we’ve seen athletes amplify their voices, begin to reap benefits from monetizing their Name, Image and Likeness and receive a favorable Supreme Court ruling in the Alston case, all while the NCAA’s authority has significantly eroded. Yet the committee includes no current Division I athlete, much less one from a revenue-driving sport.

“You have an institution that, quite frankly, could be in a death spiral,” Stahl told On3. “And still, in that moment of crisis, they cannot bring themselves to even put together a committee that would stave off their possible death spiral. The NCAA specifically and member institutions specifically are run by people for the last 20 to 30 years who are just the least innovative minds you can imagine at a time when we need people who have innovative minds to figure out how to do things differently. Because, I mean, you can’t expect the same voices to all of a sudden start saying something different, right?”

The committee includes a mix of university presidents and administrators across all collegiate levels. Athlete representation includes Megan Koch, a track and field athlete from Division III Colorado College; Madeleine McKenna, a volleyball player from Division II California University of Pennsylvania; and Kendall Spencer, a former track-and-field athlete at Division I New Mexico. 

Bilas said he has no issues with any of the individuals on the committee, calling them “very good, very smart people.” But he has yet to hear a new idea, adding, “Everybody knows what to say about, you know, ‘Put the welfare of the student-athlete first’ and ‘College sports is full of many challenges’ and all this crap. But you haven’t heard one idea that’s come through. Let’s wait and see, but given the past history of the NCAA, could anybody reasonably expect that we’re going to have a good outcome? I don’t think you can.”

Does the NCAA not realize how tone deaf the composition of the committee looks?

“They don’t care,” Bilas said. “They know how bad it looks. They don’t care. Nobody is that tone deaf. … The first thing that has to happen is the NCAA Board of Governors has to be changed. They should all resign. Any board that extended the contract of the president before the gender equity report was finished is not functioning properly.”

Mit Winter, a Kansas City-based college sports law attorney, said it was baffling that no current basketball player is on the committee in light of the fact that most of the association’s revenue comes from the NCAA tournament. He noted that most committee members have worked for some time in the current college sports model that they now are supposed to be trying to reinvent. 

“It’s hard for me to see how, when they have worked in that model, they’ve come up with that model and kind of their livelihood is dependent on that model, how they’re going to have any incentive to really come up with a new model that changes a whole lot,” Winter told On3 Sports.

The constitutional convention is expected to convene no later than Nov. 15. United College Athlete Advocates, an independent non-profit that aims to serve as a collective voice for athletes, expressed its unhappiness in a tweet.

There are 175,000 current D1 college athletes, but ZERO serve on the @NCAA constitution committee. Reform in college sport is not possible unless there is equal representation by college athletes. Our voice will not be silenced. #WeAreOne🟡 https://t.co/KEYCw0CRZC

— United College Athlete Advocates (@ucaa_one) August 12, 2021

“We’ve had a dozen years of scandal and bad decisions and wasted money on legal fees and the like,” Bilas said. “How many hundreds of millions of dollars has the NCAA kicked away trying to perpetuate illegal rules? So now they’re facing a challenge where they’re going to have to deregulate. I’m not sure they know how to do it. Or they want to do it.

“But one way or another, they are going to be forced to do it.”

An indictment of the NCAA enforcement arm

“Football will never again be placed ahead of education, nurturing and protecting young people.” – Mark Emmert, July 2012

Those were Emmert’s words when the NCAA levied severe sanctions against Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. The statement doesn’t exactly resonate the same way today, not after the association said Baylor did not break any rules even though leaders of its football program failed to report some incidents of sexual violence to appropriate authorities and diverted cases from the student conduct or criminal processes. 

The Baylor and Penn State cases are clearly different, and were handled differently. In Penn State’s case, the NCAA drew criticism for circumventing the typical infractions process, relying on the report from former FBI director Louis Freeh and ruling on matters outside its normal purview. It was considered a one-off; the NCAA ultimately lessened the penalties. 

“With Penn State, they got beaten back in a lot of ways. And they stayed completely out of (other cases with abhorrent behavior),” said Bilas, referencing sexual assault scandals in subsequent years at Ohio State, Michigan State and USC that the NCAA enforcement arm did not address.

While the underlying issues were quite different, Bilas sees similarities between the Baylor case and the North Carolina athletic-academic scandal that did not result in an academic fraud finding. Certain matters are outside the association’s purview, he said, and “the schools have figured it out: They know how to fight this stuff.”

The Penn State case could have provided the NCAA with somewhat of a blueprint for how to handle egregious conduct not addressed in its bylaws. But the Baylor case again spotlighted the severe limitations, omissions and flaws within NCAA bylaws. 

What the NCAA emotionally and intellectually wanted to do in the Baylor case, Bilas said, their rules didn’t allow them to do. He said a lot of smart people look at the process and say, “ ‘This is beyond flawed.’ But there isn’t anything right now that the NCAA is doing that isn’t flawed.”

He added: “What right-minded person could say, ‘Yeah, you should have done that with Penn State, but then you should ignore what happened at Michigan State when it happened to athletes on campus’? That is impossible to justify. But it makes sense given that that is not an NCAA issue.”

Stahl said it is almost as if the NCAA has “thrown up its hands” with football because it believes it is out of control.

“In terms of the NCAA being able to rein in egregious behavior in programs across the country, it’s just not happening anymore, which is exactly why we need a players association,” he said. “There has to be some sort of new third-party enforcement, regulatory apparatus in place, and that is where I see us going.”

‘Bracing’ for Delta variant’s impact on ticket sales

Tulane became the first FBS football program to require vaccination or a negative COVID test within 72 hours to attend a home game, Yahoo! Sports reported Thursday. And one source in the ticketing space whose company partners with high-profile schools said he has a keen eye on the Delta variant.

“Everyone is bracing for what may come,” the official said regarding protocols for fans and stadium seating configurations. “Hopefully there will be minimal impact.”

On the conference side, the Pac-12 announced Thursday that if a school is unable to play a game “through its own fault,” which will be determined by commissioner George Kliavkoff, it will forfeit. Jon Wilner reported that the financial loss of a forfeiture, about $7 million per game, would be shared by all league schools.

The Mountain West already had announced its forfeiture policies.

Quick hits . . .

• Regarding realignment, Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor told John Kurtz of KMAN in Manhattan, Kan., that, “Nothing is going to happen this year. I’d be shocked. I do have friends in other leagues and when I talk to those ADs that I’m close with, I’m hearing they are not doing anything.” Process that as you wish, considering how blindsided eight Big 12 schools and commissioner Bob Bowlsby were with the less-than-a-month-old Houston Chronicle report about the possibility of Texas and Oklahoma bolting.

• Britton Banowsky, the executive director of the College Football Playoff Foundation, told On3 that the CFP Foundation and Bowl Season are partnering to give all bowl games the opportunity to celebrate teachers nationwide. The new “Bowl Season Extra Yard for Teachers” program will be made available to all bowl games in addition to the funding (projected at $1.5 million for this season) provided through existing bowl partnerships. That means this alliance potentially could bring an additional $400,000 (roughly $2 million total) in support for teachers and school districts during a time when they continue to confront significant pandemic-related challenges. “We would be excited for this initiative whenever it was launched,” said Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli, “but we feel especially good about being able to launch this year, given all the challenges, and with teachers and students getting back to school in person.” The second-annual “Big Day” will be held Sept. 14, which Banowsky said is the largest single-day effort of community impact ever undertaken by the extended college football family. Banowsky: “Teachers typically don’t get much recognition or get a pat on the back, much less provided resources. When we say, ‘We’re going to fund your projects,’ or we say, ‘We’re going to buy a Chick-fil-A sandwich,’ they’re incredibly grateful. That makes us want to do more.”