Ask Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet Chair David Knight about Duke or North Carolina-Greensboro basketball and he gets excited.

Ask David Knight about core courses, continuing-eligibility requirements and graduation rates and gets really excited.

What's with this guy? Almost anyone can get excited about basketball. But not as many can get pumped over academic issues. But then, there aren't many David Knights out there.

As far as the NCAA is concerned, that's too bad.

But Knight's NCAA ties go beyond the cabinet. In short, he's been an academic home base for Association committees and consultants for more than 15 years.

"I do know a little bit about the organization of the NCAA," Knight admitted before heading to chair his final AEC Cabinet meeting in June. "My brain can't retain all of it, but I do know how to look it up."

The reason he knows "all that" is because he went through "all that" first-hand in the 1980s when North Carolina-Greensboro made what at the time was an unprecedented move. The Division III school made the move to Division I in five short years.

Schools had changed classification in single sports before, but no institution had made such a progression with all of its sports teams simultaneously. "And we didn't ask for a waiver of a single thing," Knight said. "We got everything right the way the rules were written."

He was the faculty rep at North Carolina-Greensboro at the time, a job he was asked to take on early in his tenure there. Knight arrived at the school in 1967, fresh from doing post-doctoral work at Ohio State University. That followed a master's and a Ph.D from Duke University and a bachelor's from the University of Louisville in his hometown. All three academic stops for Knight were athletics powers, but North Carolina-Greensboro was a different animal, at least in 1967.

"When I got to Greensboro to teach," Knight said, "there was virtually no athletics program. I stuck my head up and said, 'Where are athletics?' And I was told, 'Right where we want them.' "

But then tuberculosis hurled Knight's body straight to bed. Most would call themselves victims in such a situation, but Knight calls himself lucky when he talks about the disease. "I was lucky to have contracted it after there was a cure," he said.

"But it sure put me in the books as an undergraduate."

Knight read everything -- history, science, sports -- you name it. He may have been grounded, but he became well-rounded.

His interest in sports remained even after the long rehabilitation. When at Duke, he returned to Louisville for Thanksgiving break and stopped by the arena to watch the Cardinals' basketball team practice. The Louisville coach saw Knight in the stands and said, "Hey, you're in Durham now, aren't you? We're playing there this year. Why don't you send me a scouting report?"

Knight said he would, "but Duke was loaded then, so I wrote him back and said, 'Don't come.' "

He even played rugby for a spell at Duke, along with University of South Carolina, Columbia, Athletics Director Mike McGee. But though the sports flame was fanned, Knight said, "it was time to get serious about something."

So he became an academician ... with a decent background in sports.

A father's influence

Much of that sports background was instilled in Knight as a youth. His father was a high-school principal for 42 years.

"Athletics was something he paid attention to," Knight said. "The football and basketball coach lived in our house. I remember traveling in the back seat of the car and listening to them talk about athletics since I was about four years old."

"It didn't hurt me to have that history."

"David was a calming influence there," said Jerry Kingston, Arizona State University faculty athletics representative, of the NCAA's work with the high-school community. "The fact that he lets all points of view be expressed, then tries to bring consensus and resolution to conflicting and difficult points of view is one of his greatest skills."

Kingston knows a little bit about what Knight has been through. The two share similar NCAA paths, both having served as president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association (FARA) while at the same time steering high-profile NCAA committees. Kingston was a member of the NCAA Council and chair of the Academic Requirements Committee, but he thinks Knight's tenure in the NCAA's academic realm has been more tumultuous than his own simply because of the pressures of the day.

"I'm glad he was doing it rather than me -- I think I had the easier time of it."

Indeed, the decision to allow high schools more latitude in identifying core courses was one that did not have uniform support from NCAA members. Yet, Knight, who managed to avoid an advocacy podium for either side, knew that something had to give. After all, he said, the rules in question were almost two decades old at the time.

"Our core curricula had found their way into the NCAA Manual in the early 1980s," he said. "That spans several curricular generations. I don't think anybody would have argued that the passage of 18 to 20 years might necessitate looking at those rules again because they may not be being applied to the high schools they were written for."

"People are realizing that until prospective student-athletes enroll in our universities, they don't really belong to us," Knight said. "The amateurism package is full of that notion. We need to be careful about what kind of control we want to exert on kids before they get to college."

Initial, continuing eligibility

Little excites Knight more than talking about developing the right standards to help student-athletes progress from being high-school seniors to college graduates. The area took on a new urgency when the Division I Board of Directors charged the AEC Cabinet to conduct a review of Prop 16, the Association's current initial-eligibility rules, several years ago.

That review extended through a lawsuit that two student-athletes brought against the Association, claiming that Prop 16 had a disparate impact on ethnic minorities and prospects from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Though it was not in the Association's best interests to decide on whether it wanted to modify Prop 16 while the litigation was active, the AEC Cabinet went into a research mode in order to be prepared if the case broke. That happened this May when an appeals court denied the plaintiffs' request to amend their complaint to assert intentional discrimination, which essentially ended the litigation.

Knight's excitement stems from recent research that supports a different use of academic parameters to better predict college graduation. What he and the cabinet are discussing is to continue using the high-school academic parameters (high-school core courses, core-course grade-point average and test scores), but to use them only to predict "milepost" grade-point averages in college. Continuing-eligibility standards would be relied upon more to predict college graduation.

Knight believes -- and many of his cabinet peers agree -- that re-weighting the high-school parameters to favor the core GPA might improve initial eligibility (since the test-score component is the primary stumbling block), and that re-emphasizing continuing eligibility once the prospect enrolls will better predict college graduation.

The discussions are preliminary -- in fact, no NCAA entity has gone so far as to say that changing Prop 16 is the right road to take -- but Knight seems to think that the wheels are turning.

"Presidents have always indicated that our academic rules should be predicated on their effect on graduation. I think we'll be able to tell presidents now that we can make a better prediction about graduation, which is what they've wanted to hear."

The role model

Knight has stayed at North Carolina-Greensboro so long for many reasons. He prefers the life a larger city affords over that of a small town, he appreciates working for a school that lets him pursue his interests, and he covets his relationship with Athletics Director Nelson Bobb.

"The irony is," Bobb said, "I wrote a letter to our chancellor asking that we have a permanent faculty athletics representative. Now here we are 15 years later and the man has more clout in the NCAA than I would ever have dreamed to have had."

Perhaps no one knows David Knight's value to the Association more than Bobb. A peer of Knight's for about 18 years, Bobb appreciates his colleague's work ethic, his dedication and his ability to tote the water on tough issues.

"Our campus is up in arms with him on the amateurism issue," Bobb said. "I end up having to deflect him in conference meetings, too. One time, he created a target that he pinned to himself during a conference meeting that (NCAA liaison) Robin Green also attended and he said, 'If you're going to shoot, shoot for here and I'll instruct Robin to get as far away as she can in case you miss.'

"I would tell people not to shoot the messenger," Bobb said, "because we're lucky we have this guy as one."

Southern Conference Commissioner Alfred White also respects Knight. "For a conference that hangs its hat on developing life-long leaders and role models," he said, "Dave Knight does a good job of being out there and making himself the kind of role model we want to have. He's an academician by profession, but he has college athletics in his heart, and he's got it in as about as good a perspective as anybody could."

Knight shrugs off the accolades, preferring instead to focus on what's become his passion -- promoting the student side of the student-athlete.

Knight witnessed that with his son, who went on to enjoy a brief career with Major League Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates.

Knight, who will continue in his role as one of the NCAA's initial-eligibility consultants after his term as chair of the AEC Cabinet expires September 1, is all about helping student-athletes survive. He said that is best accomplished, ironically, by staying out of their way as much as possible.

Knight said that's why he's so supportive of the various deregulation packages underway in Division I, including amateurism. He, along with Christine Grant, former director of women's athletics at the University of Iowa, and others, have advocated an amateurism deregulation package since it was developed three years ago.

"He's notorious for starting stories but not finishing them immediately," Bobb said of his colleague. "If you're on a 500-mile trip with him, you'll get those stories in 50- or 60-mile bits."

That might represent Knight's tenure with the NCAA -- lots of 50- or 60-mile bits that add up to a long and meaningful contribution.

Though the AEC Cabinet chapter in Knight's tale is ending, the book isn't ready to be closed. Where there's an NCAA academic/athletics issue, Knight likely will be lurking. And when that happens, Knight will be able to talk shop about grade-point averages, core-course requirements and predictive academic cohorts with anybody in the room.

He might be willing to talk a little basketball, too.