Knight Ridder
Calling it "a sea change in college sports," NCAA President Myles Brand heralded a new set of academic reforms voted in Thursday by the Division I Board of Directors - reforms that would penalize schools that don't keep athletes eligible and fail to graduate them.
Under guidelines that go into effect over the next three years, coaches whose players become academically ineligible and don't graduate will find themselves losing scholarships and, if poor performance is ongoing, being removed from postseason consideration.
"This is landmark legislation," Brand said. "We will need to implement these and hold strong."
As part of the reform, the way the NCAA calculates graduation rates will change. The association will start giving schools credit for athletes who transfer in and then graduate. The NCAA will start tracking students for the new rule beginning with the 2004-05 freshman class.
The Committee on Academic Performance will administer the new system, which includes two sets of penalties - contemporaneous and historical. "Contemporaneous" relates to the immediate loss of scholarships, and "historical" relates to the postseason ban for programs whose athletes continually haven't made the grade in the classroom.
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Scholarships could start being eliminated in the fall of 2006, and postseason bans could hit in the fall of 2008. The board wants to study three years of academic progress data before hammering programs with postseason penalties.
Board chairman Robert E. Hemenway, chancellor at Kansas, had a message to future college athletes: "We're going to do everything in our power to determine that you graduate."
NCAA leaders view Thursday's action as forcing accountability on coaches and athletic departments in much the same way other decisions have forced accountability on athletes. Earlier academic reform packages, for instance, increased the number of core courses athletes must pass in high school to get into college and increased the amount of coursework an athlete must pass a year to keep his eligibility.
This fall, the NCAA will send a letter to every Division I school outlining the status of each of the school's sports had the reforms already been in place. That's to highlight which sports have the most work ahead.
An NCAA committee is studying where to draw a so-called "cutline"-the dividing line for all sports. The cutline has to be drawn before the NCAA's evaluation letters can be prepared.
"This reform is not just targeted at football or basketball. It's targeted at all sports," Hemenway said.
In other action Thursday, the board:
Rescinded the controversial rule for basketball, effective immediately. Put in place to prevent coaches from running players off, the rule said programs could sign no more than five recruits in any one year and no more than eight in any two-year period.
The ruling means the University of Central Florida, for instance, now can get up to the full scholarship level as soon as it wants. Coach Kirk Speraw's team has been handicapped by low scholarship numbers the past two seasons because of the rule.
