The NCAA News - News and Features

October 20, 1997

NCAA provides response to Kansas City Star series

The Kansas City Star recently completed a six-part series on the NCAA that sought to demonstrate that the Association has strayed from its mission and has become excessively influenced by money.

Newspaper critiques of the NCAA are common, and in many regards, the Star series represented a compilation of many previous NCAA-related articles. In the past, the Association has not reacted to such series after they have been printed, but in this case, a response was deemed necessary because of the enormity of the series, its wide distribution, the severity of the claims, the lack of balance and numerous inaccuracies.

The series was prominently featured on page 1 of The Kansas City Star each day from October 5 through October 10. It consumed two to three full pages inside every day filled with graphics, photos and related articles.

The NCAA was given an opportunity to respond the Sunday after the completion of the series. However, to do so it would have had to meet a deadline that would have meant submitting copy before the series was complete. A 2,300-word response -- signed by NCAA Executive Director Cedric W. Dempsey and Samuel H. Smith, president of Washington State University and chair of the NCAA Executive Committee -- ran in the October 15 issue of the Star, five days after the completion of the series. The article appears on page 4 of this issue of The NCAA News.

As Dempsey and Smith note in their commentary, it is impossible to respond to the specific concerns raised in the series in such a restricted amount of space. For that reason, the NCAA will provide responses to specific concerns and post them on its World Wide Web site. The address is www.ncaa.org/kcstar.