NCAA to recommend new, tighter controls on spending

INDIANAPOLIS -- The NCAA will recommend tighter controls on spending by its member athletic departments, with the reforms coming from the schools themselves rather than through the adoption of national standards.\nA reform structure similar to one adopted recently for academic standards won't work for spending because the NCAA does not have authority to dictate how its member schools should manage their operating budgets, NCAA President Myles Brand said Thursday.\nBrand will release a task force report on the future of Division I sports Monday, when he speaks at the National Press Club in Washington.\nThe 50-member task force, appointed by Brand almost two years ago, found increased spending by athletic departments adds "significant stress" to universities already under financial strain.\n"As pressures to win and to generate revenue increase," he said, "the integration of athletics with the academy, the interference with presidential authority by avid fans or governing board members and the primacy of education in the student-athlete experience all have been threatened."\nHe urged university presidents and chancellors to "take reform home" by making leadership decisions at the campus level.\nTask force chairman Peter Likins, the retired president at the University of Arizona, said most of the needed changes cannot be accomplished by new NCAA regulations.\n"What is required now is courageous leadership, most importantly from presidents and chancellors, but also from faculty members, governing boards, athletics directors and coaches," Likins said.\nHe said current spending trends "simply are unsustainable."\nLikins said the report will include more than two dozen recommendations.\nAmong other matters at the Division I board of directors meeting Thursday, the Football Championship Subdivision -- formerly Division I-AA -- declined to reconsider adding a 12th football game. The board in April defeated a proposal to add one extra game each season, but a number of schools asked for an override vote. Now, the proposal will be considered by the division membership at the NCAA convention in Orlando in January.\nThe full membership at that time will also consider an override of a proposal to allow graduate students to transfer to other schools and gain immediate athletic eligibility in all sports. That proposal was approved by the board earlier this year.\nThe board Thursday also defeated a proposal to exclude athletes who graduate with eligibility remaining from the data used to compile schools' Academic Performance Rate. The NCAA's committee on academic performance said all athletes should be subject to "at least minimal academic requirements, including remaining eligible"