When the NCAA and CBS shook hands on an 11-year, $6 billion television rights and marketing agreement two years ago, reaction ranged from festive to Faustian. While most NCAA member institutions cheered the additional revenue and long-term security brought by the new contract, which begins in September, the media and general public wondered if the NCAA had lost its mind and sold its soul.

What's good -- and plenty -- about the agreement is all above the surface. Aside from the obvious raise in revenue (about $60 million the first year and about 8 percent more each year after), there's the increased exposure for all of the NCAA's 87 championships, a broader platform of television networks and other media from which to promote the NCAA, and hence the opportunity to put a much-needed face on an Association often criticized for being a cold, bureaucratic regulatory force.

The Faustian flip side festers beneath the surface. The record-breaking financial agreement comes at a time in which intercollegiate sports has been publicly attacked for its commercialism and spending beyond its means in big-time sports, and compromising the educational mission with corporate deals that in the public's eye blur the boundary between amateur and professional, the NCAA's most coveted distinction.

With the devilish dollars juxtaposed against an angelic mission, how can the NCAA pull off such a philosophical balancing act?

To be sure, the NCAA isn't yet guilty of having sold its soul. The Association has something that everybody wants -- the Division I Men's Basketball Championship -- and the very act of selling that event doesn't render the NCAA a commercial opportunist.

But the NCAA does have a commercial image, a rap the Association may be able to beat if it can hang on to the ideals it originally set forth before the negotiations with the networks began.

'Prototype of the future'

Those goals were simple, at least on paper. First and foremost, the NCAA wanted to be "fairly compensated" for its wares. Most people would say $6 billion is not only more than fair, it kicks fair in the backside. But the NCAA didn't go looking for $6 billion -- that was the market value of the package when it was put out to bid.

The $6 billion also isn't for just the Men's Final Four. When NCAA President Cedric W. Dempsey announced that the NCAA had christened a new day with an unprecedented bundled rights agreement, he not only raised the collective brow of the membership, but of other media as well.

"A number of people have told me that we established the 'prototype of the future' with this agreement," Dempsey said. "It gives us a different platform from which to deliver our messages that we didn't have before."

"Simply stated," said Patriot League Executive Director Carolyn Schlie Femovich, "bundling allows the NCAA to maximize its inventory as revenue potential."

If that part of the bundle sounds commercial, it is. The concept is to use the leverage of the most valuable commodity -- in this case the Division I Men's Basketball Championship -- to raise the value of the rest of the NCAA's assets for a maximized total rights fee.

"It's like the rising tide," said Bernadette McGlade, associate commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. "Any time you can leverage your strongest products with those that are developing, the latter are lifted with the rising tide."

But the bundle provides even more. It includes radio broadcasting and Web-casting rights and access to NCAA marks. It includes an NCAA corporate-partner program and the Association's popular Hoop City events. It includes opportunities that enable CBS and ESPN to cross-promote their NCAA events on the other's air time. The bundle also benefits the NCAA in that the Association receives almost 200 promotional messages annually on CBS and its Viacom family of channels, and 150 messages annually on radio. There will be nightly 30-minute programs during March Madness that focus strictly on basketball, and monthly 30-minute shows year-round that focus on intercollegiate sports issues of the day.

"Bundling is interesting," said Big Ten Conference Commissioner Jim Delany. "The idea is to have your Internet, sponsorships and radio values aligned in the same direction in order to achieve the highest value for the entity that has paid most of the money, in this case CBS. You don't want to have those other aspects work against the media that drives the rights fee. For the NCAA and CBS, it made some sense."

Bundling also means there will be increased exposure for NCAA championships. CBS and ESPN didn't just buy the Men's and Women's Final Fours, they bought all 87 NCAA championships and guaranteed air time for each.

In that regard, the bundle provided the NCAA with a maximum return.

"Having something everybody wants," Washington State University President V. Lane Rawlins said about the Men's Final Four, "gives us an opportunity to say to the networks, 'OK, if you want that, then you need to do some things that we think are good for intercollegiate athletics.'

"In addition to just making money, bundling gives us an opportunity to promote the things we think are good about the NCAA."

The image dilemma

Whether the NCAA can in fact promote its "good things" is the crux of the agreement's success. Making money is one thing, but overcoming an image in which the Association could be perceived as merely a provider that does noth-ing but salt away the cash is another. "The perception out there is that there's this huge rights fee and that somehow those dollars are being stuffed in our pockets or put in our coffers," said McGlade. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Telling the truth -- over and over again -- through the promotional platforms gained in the agreement may chip away at the image problems. NCAA Senior Vice-President Tom Jernstedt claims the truth is embedded in the NCAA's attributes -- things like the high caliber of student-athlete competition, the high number of championships opportunities, the diversity of the student-athlete body, the good sportsmanship in NCAA competition and the partnership between intercollegiate sports and higher education.

"But we also have research that tells us those attributes in some cases might be more aspirational than realized," Jernstedt said. In other words, Jernstedt said, the NCAA has talked the talk, but the public and others believe it hasn't walked the walk. To a large degree, that might be because the public still thinks of the NCAA more as an entity that places programs on probation rather than one that sponsors national championships. It's hard for the Association to champion its mission when its rules-making and rules-enforcing authority stick in the public's craw.

But Jernstedt, who for three decades has played an integral role in growing the Men's Final Four -- the NCAA's crown jewel of championships -- believes the NCAA can use the agreements with CBS and ESPN to make the attributes real to everyone.

"While those of us involved with intercollegiate sports on a day-to-day basis know that many of those attributes have in fact been realized," Jernstedt said, "the promotional opportunities through the new contract will help the NCAA get those core messages across more globally."

Money's mixed messages

The sheer financial magnitude of the contract should help get some of those messages across. The increased air time alone at least gives the NCAA the podium more often than before. But in some ways, the money is the NCAA's own worst enemy, feeding a public perception that already labels the Association as gluttonous.

But Dempsey and others say it's not the revenue itself that's bad. "It's what you do with it that matters," he said.

That's still a disconnect for many who think the NCAA has a poor track record in financial matters. For the past year in particular, so much attention has been focused on athletics spending, especially for facility upgrades and coaches' salaries, that some people expect more of the same. Perhaps the strongest criticism came from the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which in its latest report last July said there is a "tangible downside" for the escalating costs for the majority of schools whose big-time programs cannot pay for themselves. "They must siphon funds from general revenue to try to keep up with the Joneses," the report said. "Pursuit of success in this context jeopardizes not only the universities' moral heritage but also their financial security."

David Goldfield, who is the faculty athletics representative at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and current president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association, said it's easy for the NCAA's credibility to be compromised when the public is bombarded with mixed messages.

"When you look at the proliferation of Tuesday night football, Thursday night football, basketball games at late or odd hours, that's the sort of thing that might contradict the educational mission," Goldfield said. "But what are the media folks going to do, walk away and not take what is valuable to them? No, they're not going to do that. We become so excited about exposure in this media-oriented society that we become a little starry-eyed, which clouds our better judgment."

But, Goldfield said, "There's nothing wrong with money and making it, especially if you can use it to further your mission. The problem comes when the money diverts you from what you're supposed to be doing. I may be too optimistic, but I believe you can accept corporate financial support and still maintain your integrity."

While Goldfield called himself an optimist, the Big Ten's Delany calls himself a pessimist -- or at least a realist -- "when it comes to trying to explain how you balance educational values and $6 billion."

Indeed, walking the fine line between the educational mission and commercialism was the final goal, and perhaps the most challenging, in the NCAA negotiation team's charge.

"What you do," Delany said, "is try to explain that intercollegiate athletics is an opportunity engine, and in many cases those opportunities are provided by institutions out of their general fund. Part of the value of the TV agreement then is that it reduces the gap between what is spent and what is earned so that institutions don't have to pay some of those costs."

Washington State's Rawlins agreed and said that in order to get the best rights fee, the NCAA had to first admit its product was for sale. That's admittedly dangerous, but he said the NCAA couldn't expect to sponsor a quality experience for student-athletes otherwise.

"You have to admit that we've gone into a market, that our events are for sale," said Rawlins, an NCAA Executive Committee and Budget Committee veteran. "That isn't necessarily bad, but it can be. It can be totally bad if the only things you're focused on are those that have a price tag. But I think we reached the best compromise we can come up with that's acceptable to all parties. We're in a world that none of us individually control and that world is very commercial. You can't do quality intercollegiate athletics on an Association-wide scale without putting out the 'for sale' sign."

Rawlins cited the recent Winter Olympic Games as an example. He said the conflict there was that people liked the show they saw but claimed that it was overcommercialized. "But you can't have it both ways," Rawlins said. "If you don't commercialize at least to some extent, the revenue won't be there and you can't do a first-class job."

Big East Conference Commissioner Mike Tranghese said, "There's something that everyone forgets: You can't take the money and then say you don't want some of the things that come with it. If you don't want something, then don't take the money.

"Obviously, this Association made a decision to accept $6 billion under a set of circumstances," said Tranghese, who is a former chair of the Division I Men's Basketball Committee. "We have an obligation to adhere to that. I hear people say we shouldn't have done this or that ... well, it's too late. If we as an Association don't want certain things, then we have to tell the party at the time of the negotiation. We could have done that and gotten less money."

Proof is in the programming

Taking less money obviously wasn't an alternative, but maintaining a reasonable balance between the Association's educational mission and its admittedly commercial intent was.

The NCAA's Dempsey has been outspoken on both. He has trumpeted the contract's revenues as a way to address student-athlete concerns, including increased championships opportunities and a better championships experience for the tens of thousands of student-athletes who participate. But he's also spoken, loudly at times, about the need for institutions to tread lightly in the commercialism realm, particularly if it muddles the institution's commitment to sports participation as part of the educational experience.

Dempsey acknowledges the two ideals make odd bedfellows, but that the NCAA is uniquely positioned to handle it. He said that unlike the Faust character, the NCAA has not sold its educational soul for financial power.

"Our uniqueness is that we still see sports as part of the educational process," said the NCAA president, who has guided the Association through two record-breaking television deals during his eight-year tenure. "That's going to bring a better balance between the educational values we have and the commercialization. In actuality, what we've done is provide more money without increasing ad time during events. We still have clean championships venues. We've done nothing to add to the commercial atmosphere. We don't have sponsors for championships.

"We've been able to increase revenue without increasing commercialization -- we've even decreased commercialization, in my view."

Tranghese said the juxtaposition of inking a big TV contract against trying to curtail spending in college athletics are "unrelated positions."

"There are two ways to deal with budgets," he said. "One is to make as much as you can, and the other is to curb expenses. But because you ask someone to cast a logical eye toward expenses doesn't mean you stop trying to make money. Yeah, $6 billion is a lot, but it's being spread out over a lot of institutions in Divisions I, II and III. I don't think there's a need to apologize for this contract. I think our institutions will spend it to provide a lot of opportunities for a lot of student-athletes in a lot of sports. I don't know what there is to apologize for about that."

So how does the NCAA gauge its success in the educational mission/ commercialism balancing act? Jernstedt said the proof will be in the programming.

"The NCAA is not highly commercialized, and does not want to be," he said. "That makes the educational mission/commercialism goal a pressure vise from the television and corporate entities that have to cover their investment in this agreement. But if we can harness that energy from the networks and use the original goals as a platform, we can send the messages that actually change the NCAA image and expose the many positive things about student-athletes."

The ACC's McGlade agreed that the NCAA has to prove itself as a "guardian" of the goals going in to the negotiations.

"That will be the real proof," she said. "Numbers of games on TV and distributions are easily measured and people will be able to see if that part of the deal is being upheld, but the commitment to the PSAs, the commitment to the messages of higher education and the commitment to new supplemental programs that benefit student-athletes is the standard by which the success of the contract will be judged."

The Patriot League's Femovich believes the NCAA can make good on its claim. "If decisions are principle driven and not money driven, then the new revenues can be used effectively," she said.

"Those of us who are implementing all the aspects of the contract use the original negotiating goals as a measuring stick in our day-to-day business," Jernstedt said.

That figures to make for a lot of measuring over the next 11 years, but if the plan works, the NCAA image might end up standing pretty tall.

Now that would be worth a lot more than a bundle of money, wouldn't it?