College NCAA Division I-AAA

Division I-AAA change in college sports NCAA,

It looks like change is coming to college sports once again.  And this isn’t the endless cycle of conference realignment kind, either.  This could be a much more seismic shift that shakes the NCAA to its core.  While not a complete obliteration of the NCAA structure, it would be close.  The BCS conferences are discussing creating a separate division consisting of just themselves.  College sports is already “haves” and “have-nots.”  Should this happen, that gap will only become wider.

With the ridiculous amount of money that the TV networks are paying the conferences for college football (which is what’s led to the ridiculous conference jumping), something like this seemed inevitable.  It’s no secret that the BCS schools haven’t been happy with the current structure for a while.  Nor have the vast majority of Division I schools that don’t have the ability to fund their entire Athletic Department with the revenue they bring in from football.

Some of the concerns of the BCS programs are valid.  Texas, which has a BCS football program, operates its Athletic Department completely differently than Bucknell, which has an FCS football team that costs the school millions of dollars a year.  Likewise, both are different than the likes of DePaul, which doesn’t have a football team at all.  (Hell, the different agendas of football and basketball schools is the whole reason the American Athletic Conference even exists in the first place.)  Yet, since all of those schools are Division I, they all have the same voting rights.  In the eyes of Texas, why does DePaul get to have an opinion about football?  Honestly, they’ve got a point.

They also want to know why football is governed by the same rules as women’s tennis.  I think I see where they were trying to go, but I’m not sure I agree with this one.  The only rules that are the same are ones that apply to all sports when it comes to things like eligibility, academics and rules compliance.  Yes, football players are required to go to class just like women’s tennis players are.  What a novel concept!  I’m not sure why that’s such a problem.

One of the other main arguments of the big programs is that it’s gotten too easy to become Division I.  This is absolutely correct.  Did you know that Grand Canyon and Albeline Christian and UMass Lowell are now Division I institutions?  They’ve made it somewhat harder to move up to D-I because you’re now required to have a conference to join before you can make the jump, but that doesn’t change the fact there are way too many Division I schools and a lot of them have no business being there.  NJIT and Longwood should be sitting at the kiddies table, not hobnobbing with the cream of the NCAA crop.

It’s these smaller schools that squashed the proposed legislation that would’ve provided a stipend of up to $2,000 to cover a student-athlete’s “total cost of attendance.”  For the BCS schools, providing this stipend would’ve been no big deal.  But they’re in the minority on that front.  For everybody else, it would’ve been a tremendous additional cost that they couldn’t afford to bear.  That’s why they voted it down.

The stipend really seems to be the impetus that has got the BCS schools going on this trajectory.  And it does seem like their hearts are in the right place.  They want to level the playing field, and, unfortunately, the only way to do that in their opinion is to let them play on one level and everybody else on another.  In a perfect world, this would work out great for everybody.  This isn’t a perfect world, though.  While some may view a separate BCS division as a great idea, I think it would lead to more problems than they’re trying to solve.

For starters, they’re only talking about football here.  This is my biggest problem with college football and the role it plays on many campuses.  What about every other sport?  I understand football is what brings in the money, but there doesn’t seem to be any flaws in the system with any other sport.  Why cut off your leg because you broke your toe?  Changing the entire structure of college sports simply to help football teams make even more money seems silly to me.

It would open up opportunities for the non-BCS Division I schools on the national stage.  National Championships in even non-revenue sports seem to be monopolized by BCS programs, simply because they have the money for more scholarships and, as a result, bring in better athletes.  So, like I said, it would level the playing field.  However, it would also water down the rest of Division I and reduce it to basically on-par with Division II and Division III.  The TV money that they get now would be gone.  Because the TV networks don’t care about lower-level Division I schools.  They want the big names.  And that would further the divide.

There’s an even bigger problem I foresee, though.  Should these radical changes move along and they develop some sort of new division involving only the BCS schools, I’m sure offering stipends to student-athletes would pass with flying colors.  However, I’m also fairly certain there would be an attempt to limit the stipends to football, men’s basketball and other revenue-producing sports.  Well, without even bringing Title IX into it, that would raise equity issues even within these schools.  Why should a football player on full scholarship get a stipend, but not a student-athlete on the women’s golf team who has the same full scholarship?  You give stipends to one team, you’ve got to give them to everybody.  I wouldn’t be opposed to some sort of hybrid model where only student-athletes on full athletic scholarships are eligible for stipends, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The NCAA is in need of reform.  I don’t think there’s anybody who would disagree with that.  But something this radical isn’t the answer.  Can the necessary changes take place without blowing up the entire system?  Yes, I believe it can.  But they have to give it time to be implemented and work.  Sadly, with the current state of college athletics, I’m not sure they’ll be given that time they need.  And the system as we know it might be forever changed as a result.