Brand: NCAA's next crusade is overspending

INDIANAPOLIS -- With a package of academic reforms in place, the NCAA's next crusade will address what its president calls a dangerous drift toward professionalism and sports entertainment.\nSpending enormous amounts of money to achieve athletic success, Myles Brand said Thursday, is "distorting the mission of higher education."\n"This escalation of success demanding even more success has good people with noble intentions chasing both the carrot and their tails," he said in the final speech this year in the NCAA Hall of Champions Speakers Series.\nIt is a message he has delivered often in speeches since last spring and one he will take to the NCAA board during the association's convention in Dallas in January.\nPart of the problem stems from the mistaken belief that there's a correlation between success on the field and the amount of money spent by the university, a myth that won't die, Brand said.\nHe called college sports "the original reality TV."\n"It's extraordinarily entertaining ... The result has been a fast-flowing new revenue stream for athletics at just the time higher education needs relief from the mountain of financial pressures of running a complex campus," Brand said.\nBut the increased revenues, mainly through the sale of television rights, let Division I athletic departments spend at a higher rate than other university departments, especially for improved facilities. Sustaining that revenue puts added pressure on winning, Brand said.\nThat, in turn, has increased the competition for outstanding athletes and coaches.\n"As a result, the competition for student-athletes, especially in the two revenue sports, football and men's basketball, has led to excesses of the kind played out in the headlines much of this past spring," he said, referring to the recruiting scandal at Colorado.\n"And the competition for good coaches has resulted in a market that yields compensation packages for a select few that puts them in the rarified air of celebrities and at odds with faculty and others on campus."\nUnlike academic requirements, which have been strengthened in recent years with the adoption of increasingly harsher penalties for schools and even individual teams that fail to graduate players on time, there's little the NCAA can do to mandate fiscal responsibility, Brand said.\nThe battle must be waged by each university and its president, who ultimately is the one held accountable, he said.\n"We're not in a crisis," he said, "but we can't wait for one to arrive"