Following is the second of a three-part comment series from athletics administrators who spoke about the amount of power vested at the conference level during the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association Fall Forum November 16, 2001, in San Diego. The first installment appeared in the February 4 issue of The NCAA News. The third part will appear in the March 4 issue.

Before 1996, NCAA legislation was hammered out at the annual NCAA Convention on a purely democratic basis. That is, one vote per institution and one vote per conference.

For example, the Big Ten Conference would have 11 individual votes on an issue, and one reserved for the conference office, which usually was dictated by how the majority of institutions voted. Thus, a 6-5 vote in the Big Ten in favor of an issue usually would result in the league office voting with the majority -- thus, a 7-5 vote in favor.

This process was somewhat time consuming and cumbersome (imagine counting 300 to 1,000 votes on a single issue with

well over 100 legislative proposals over a two-day period) but managed to keep every school fully engaged in the process, if for no other reason than the concern for its own vote.

In 1996, the Convention adopted a membership restructuring plan. The plan did away with the one-school, one-vote concept and moved to a representative form of government. That is, conferences would represent their member institutions and cast their votes on behalf of its conference members.

Ultimately, this restructuring provided for a weighted representative structure in which institutions with the highest level of athletics expenditures would have a significantly greater level of voting power. Thus, Division I now has both a Board of Directors and Management Council in which the larger and more powerful conferences control the voting majority and have a plurality among the Division I subdivisions.

Unintended competing interests

While the stated rationale for the NCAA's restructuring was to give each division more control over its own destiny and to make the legislative process easier, many people felt that the real reason was to placate the big conferences and keep them from bolting the NCAA and establishing their own governance structure. Whatever the case, I believe the new structure has resulted in dramatic changes in the way the NCAA membership operates and views itself and that it has put too much power in the hands of conference offices.

First, by eliminating the one-school, one- vote process, many individual institutions now feel disenfranchised because their institutional vote, and certainly their voice, does not really count in the final analysis since all votes come through the conference and are cast during two Management Council meetings each year when legislation is considered.

The old process by which every NCAA institution would receive the preliminary menu of legislative proposals in July, then a revised version in September, then a final edition in November to be discussed internally at each school before casting individual votes at the Convention has been lost. Instead, conferences now get together, perhaps twice a year, to discuss pending legislation that is then passed on to their Management Council representatives. As a result, the legislative proposals now get far less attention from the individual schools than they did under the old system. For example, my conference, the Mountain West, where we have 1.5 votes on the Management Council, our schools have gone from one vote at the Convention to one-eighth of 1.5 votes on the Management Council.

Also, the new process, while giving weighted authority to Division
I-A conferences, fails to anticipate that some conferences might break up or that new conferences may be formed. Such developments have threatened the original composition of both the Board and the Management Council, and, along with it, a number of carefully crafted political compromises. The most basic are those reflecting the relative position of various Division I-A conferences vis-à-vis one another and the balance of power among I-A, I-AA and
I-AAA. Thus, it is not unreasonable to view the Management Council as a federation of competing classifications rather than an assembly of conferences acting for the good of Division I as a whole.

Penalty for change

A good example of the shortcomings of the current structure occurred several years ago when the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), composed of 16 schools and originally awarded the same voting power as the so-called "equity" conferences, broke up. Even though the eight schools that broke off from the WAC to form the Mountain West were original members of the WAC and still had all the characteristics of the original equity conferences with the most voting power, they were left with half their initial voting power, as was the WAC (or what was left of it), because any other solution would have affected the balance of power enjoyed by the six leagues that now make up the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conferences and Conference USA.

This is troublesome because, Conference USA aside, it further partitions the six BCS conferences from the others, but without any objective criteria to justify the distinction.

For example, two of the most important criteria in determining the status of conferences are sports sponsorship and the number of grants-in-aid awarded. In looking briefly at those statistics a year ago, the Mountain West, even though it has only eight schools, sponsored more sports per institution than the Big 12, SEC and Conference USA, and awarded more grants-in-aid per school than the Big East and Conference USA. Nonetheless, the Mountain West has only half the voting power of the Big 12, Big East, SEC and Conference USA. This inequity is arbitrary and unfair, but continues to be in place (at least for now) because the BCS conferences control the voting power of both the Board and the Management Council, and do not wish that voting po wer to be diluted by the emergence of new conferences, no matter how legitimate those conferences may be, even by BCS standards.

BCS complications

The emergence of the BCS not only has further partitioned Division I-A, but also has in effect established a fourth division. Division I-A is now really two divisions -- the six conferences that make up the BCS (63 schools), and the rest of Division
I-A (56 schools). Thus, more than 45 percent of Division I-A has been reduced to second-class stature when it comes to competing for the national championship in football. The result is this:

* Division I-A football is the only NCAA sport in which student-athletes and coaches cannot automatically qualify through their conferences to play for the national championship. At a time when virtually all other NCAA sports have expanded their championship brackets, football continues to limit championship opportunities.

* The BCS is a championship event that is outside the authority of the NCAA.

* The eligible BCS participants, although making up only 55 percent of the Division I-A membership, control about 95 percent of all postseason football revenue and most opportunities for postseason play.

* Despite the fact that some schools have recently moved to Division I-A in football, I believe the BCS arrangement ultimately will lead to a decline in the number of schools that play college football at the highest level. Indeed, the study underway to redefine the criteria for Division I-A football is aimed at doing just that. I think this will occur because there simply are not enough tangible rewards and incentives in terms of bowl accessibility and postseason football bowl revenue for the schools that are not part of the BCS to continue to play the game at the I-A level.

This is a shame because the BCS could generate significantly more money than it does now through a college football playoff, which would allow for the champions of all legitimate Division I-A football conferences to automatically qualify for a chance to play for the national title. A playoff payout would be such that the BCS schools would make more than they do now, and the other Division I-A conferences would split enough revenue to feel encouraged to retain football at the highest level. But it appears the BCS is more concerned with controlling the football postseason -- and making certain that sixth- and seventh-place teams in their conferences play in bowl games -- than it is in facilitating a national playoff that would be in the best interests of all of Division I-A.

BCS conferences also seem to be enjoying a heightened role in dictating who shall serve on Division I committees. In one case, two commissioners circumvented the appointment process to manipulate the election of a Division I Men's Basketball Committee nominee who had been critical of the BCS. The commissioners had claimed that because the nominee had been outspoken about the BCS, he could not be trusted to be objective about the selection of teams to play in the Division I Men's Basketball Championship.

While there is an argument to be made for bigger conferences having more control of their own fate, it is not in the best interests of college athletics to have those conferences conspire in such a way that they attempt to restrict smaller conferences from competing for the national championship in football, and determining which candidates should be nominated for selection to important committees.

If we are to have some I-A conferences with more voting power than other conferences, there should be some objective criteria established to define how that is determined.

Rick Bay is the director of athletics at San Diego State University. Carolayne Henry, assistant commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, also contributed in preparing these remarks.