Colleges

Brand new ideas

Myles Brand focuses on academic aptitude over athletic.

By BOB HARIG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 17, 2003

INDIANAPOLIS -- The nets have been cut down, the trophy hoisted, but the charm of another NCAA Tournament has not been forgotten. Buzzer beaters and bracket busters reigned, and a Syracuse team that was unranked at the beginning of the season will continue to enjoy the celebration.

But Myles Brand will not be blinded by a team basking in the glow of its championship. The delight of the NCAA Tournament cannot erase the dishonor suffered by the game. And Brand plans to do something about it.

It didn't take a move to his fourth-floor office at NCAA headquarters, where he sits as president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to learn of the ills that face collegiate athletics.

No, Brand had a pretty good idea of what this billion-dollar enterprise is all about. As the former president at Indiana University, he saw the pride and passion associated with one of the country's most successful basketball programs, one that captured three national championships under legendary coach Bob Knight.

Brand became famous -- infamous to many in Indiana -- when he fired Knight for violating a "zero-tolerance" conduct policy put in place by the school.

But as president of the NCAA, he plans to make a different kind of name for himself.

Brand has proposed some revolutionary academic ideas, including penalties for poor graduation performance, which could mean loss of scholarships and perhaps a ban on postseason play. The plan also would include financial incentives for schools to graduate players and would reward athletes with a fifth year of eligibility for strong academic performance.

"It is not acceptable to have a basketball program not graduating a student-athlete in five years," Brand said in a recent interview. "No matter how flexible you are, the fact of the matter is there are about three dozen such schools in Division I right now. (The overall numbers are not good, either: Just 32 percent of Division I men's basketball players graduate.)

"The most important thing we can do is provide incentives and disincentives to those schools. Coaches and athletic directors understand competition well. If you tell them there is going to be a penalty if you break this rule or a reward if you follow that rule, they will learn those rules rather quickly. I think the next most important step in the reform movement are these incentives and disincentives."

Brand, 60, became the NCAA's fourth president on Jan., but the first who had been a university president.

And it is clear his handling of Knight's job status factored into the decision to make him president. It showed his philosophy of keeping athletics in perspective. Though Knight was not a rule-breaker, for years he was viewed as more powerful than the school president. And Brand long sought to bring the importance of athletics and academics into balance.

"We're very serious about education being an important part of intercollegiate athletics," said Bob Lawless, the president at Tulsa who chaired the NCAA search committee that hired Brand. "This hire underscores that commitment."

Those who hired Brand believe his background in academics could give him more clout with school presidents, the ones who ultimately make the call when it comes to NCAA legislation.

"He can have all the ideas in the world, but he's got to have some support in implementing them," said Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference. "He will certainly have the ear, and I think the will, of the presidents. He'll have a chance from that standpoint."

And Brand's handling of the Knight situation should win him points -- even if many still loathe him because of it in the state where he resides.

"I think the way to look at the Bob Knight incident is that it was a tremendous learning experience for Myles," said Bob Eno, a professor of East Asian languages at Indiana and the school's faculty senate president.

"People disagree on the various steps he took in the process. But everybody agrees that in the end he made a very tough decision. He came to learn a great deal about the forces that move intercollegiate athletics. Having gone through that experience has given him some maturity, a sort of trial by fire."

Among the issues Brand hopes to tackle: the threat of too much commercialization in sports; low number of minority coaches, especially in football; growth of the big-money sports and their spiraling costs; and possibility of some form of national college football playoff.

But chief among Brand's concerns is education. "Intercollegiate athletics must accommodate itself to the academic priorities of universities and colleges, not vice versa," Brand said in his inaugural address at the NCAA Convention in January.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Brand got his doctorate from the University of Rochester. He taught at Pittsburgh, Illinois-Chicago and Arizona before moving into administration as provost and vice president of academic affairs at Ohio State from 1986-89.

Brand then became president at Oregon, where he worked five years before moving to Indiana, where he took on one of the game's most successful coaches. Knight had been in Bloomington almost 30 years. Brand will not comment on the situation, other than to say, "Coach Knight is well-appreciated at Texas Tech. And I wish him well."

Before taking the NCAA job, Brand was a force behind the NCAA's recent decision to toughen academic standards for incoming freshmen by adding a course to the 13 core courses required to be eligible. Brand would like to see two more added.

"Myles was instrumental in mobilizing faculty and presidents in the reforms that were already adopted," Eno said. "I think he was a major player in that. I think he's a very good strategic thinker who understands how college administrators think and understands how faculty thinks. He's had good experience with the trustees, certainly been involved with athletics on campus. He's the ideal person for the job in a number of ways."

Brand's ideas on reform, if implemented, would be a big shift for major college sports.

Among his proposals: a reward/penalty system for graduating players. The rewards could include additional scholarships or additional funds from the NCAA. The penalties could be loss of scholarships or being barred from postseason play.

For this to happen, however, Brand said a fair system of accounting academic progress must be accepted. Now, graduation rates are determined by looking at a six-year period after a freshman athlete enters school. The system makes no concessions for athletes who transfer in good academic standing or those who leave early to turn professional.

Brand said the NCAA is working on a program called the Annual Academic Progress Rate that will determine how students are faring, year by year, in their college careers.

"You've got to count differently toward graduation when a student leaves in good academic standing," Brand said. "That's the first step, to get a fair way of counting it in place."

Brand said another hurdle must be overcome -- differentiating between schools with tougher admissions standards and those with open admissions. Some schools, inherently, will graduate more players than others.

The next step, Brand said, is to establish his incentives and disincentives, judging programs on how well they are doing at meeting the academic progress criteria.

Before the program can be fully implemented, several years of data must be processed. But Brand wants a system in place within a year that will make it all possible.

"Psychologists tell us that incentives are actually more important to changing behavior than disincentives," Brand said. "We tend to look at sanctions or punishments first, but they may not be the most effective.

"You have to look at it in stages. First, you have to give fair warning. If they don't listen to the warning, then what do you do? Now you begin to look at scholarships. That will certainly attract the attention of the coaches and the players, the number of scholarships. In the extreme case, even if that is ineffective, you should look at holding back the ability to play in postseason games. ... Now I think that's extreme. I would hope schools would change their behavior before we get to that point."

On the positive side, Brand said, the $6-billion TV contracts with CBS and ESPN to air college basketball, including the NCAA Tournament, give the organization some economic flexibility, some of which could be used to reward schools that do better than average in terms of academic progress.

Another proposal under consideration: giving players who are on pace to graduate a fifth year of eligibility. Currently, student-athletes have five years to play four. Called "redshirting," athletes often sit out a year while they mature athletically or academically. A "redshirt" year also is granted because of injury.

Brand's idea would allow for a fifth year of competition, without having to sit out.

Brand knows there is much work to be done. He is aware three teams that likely could have been playing in the NCAA Tournament (Michigan, Georgia, Fresno State) ended their seasons prematurely because of various transgressions.

And to make it all happen will not be easy. There are more than 900 member institutions spread across three divisions of the NCAA, each with its own agenda.

First, an NCAA committee develops legislation. (That is where Brand's incentives and disincentives program is now.) It then goes to the NCAA management council, which is made up of athletic administrators and faculty representatives. If they recommend the legislation be approved, the membership has 90 days to comment. The management council then reviews the legislation again, before it would be passed to the board of directors, which is made up of university presidents. In the current process, it would be next spring before the presidents would see a particular form of legislation.

That's where Brand will have to use his influence. As NCAA president, he has no vote. Nor does he have veto power. Brand's authority will come from his ability to lead, which he said is fine.

"Running up the hill by yourself doesn't do you any good," he said. "If everyone isn't on board, you're not going to get it done, whether it's a university or the NCAA.

"If this is going to work, I think we have a window of opportunity. If it's going to work, it's going to happen in the next three or four years."

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