Pressure from external forces to reform has been a matter of course for the NCAA since its inception in 1906. After all, it was U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt who prompted the Association's creation in 1906 when he told college football to shape up or ship out. But since 1991, when the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued its first report, the number of groups pushing the NCAA up the reform hill has multiplied.

In the last five years, no fewer than six significant outside groups have made concerted efforts to influence the NCAA. The Knight Commission is the most well-known, and perhaps the most influential, playing a major role in the Association's shift to presidential control in the 1990s. The commission reconvened in 2001 and issued another report, which called for even tighter presidential oversight and an end to the fiscal imbalance in Division I-A football and men's basketball programs, among other suggestions.

Just before the Knight Commission's second report, a group of presidents from the six Bowl Championship Series conferences began convening on academic reform issues. That group helped jump start the Division I Board of Directors Task Force, the primary driver behind the current reform movement.

Other groups to surface during that time include:

The Drake Group, a faculty-based organization founded by former Drake University professor Jon Ericson that is interested in academic integrity.

The Collegiate Athletes Coalition, a group composed of current and former student-athletes that aligned with the United Steelworkers of America to push for increased student-athlete benefits, among other things.

The National Student-Athletes' Rights Movement, an effort coordinated by former University of Kansas track and field coach Bob Timmons that proposed a student-athlete "bill of rights."

And most recently, a coalition composed of faculty senates from the Big Ten, Pacific-10 and other conferences, along with the Association of Governing Boards, has met with NCAA representatives, including NCAA President Myles Brand, to discuss reforms.

Knight Commission set the standard

Perhaps during no other time in NCAA history have so many external voices been so vocal.

"The size of the target (intercollegiate athletics) is larger by multiples, whether you're talking about the money or the sponsorships or the number of people who are trying to play in the big time," said Knight Foundation President Hodding Carter. "Any time you have a large and growing target, you'll have a large and growing number of folks who want to influence it, take a shot at it, cut it down to size."

The two most prominent external-based reform movements associated with intercollegiate athletics occurred about 85 years apart. In October 1905, during a college football season marred by 18 deaths and 149 serious injuries, President Roosevelt called college leaders to the White House to reform football or face an executive order from Roosevelt himself to outlaw the game.

Such external intervention worked then, and it worked again in September 1989 when the Knight Foundation of Akron, Ohio, an outgrowth of one of the major newspaper groups in the country, established a 22-member commission to suggest repairs for an athletics enterprise that in the public's eye was skidding out of control. The Knight Foundation's James L. Knight said the commission recognized that intercollegiate athletics "has a legitimate and important role to play in college and university life," and that "our interest is not to abolish that role but to preserve it by putting it back into perspective."

In March 1991, the Knight Commission issued its report that called for tighter presidential control. "The president cannot be a figurehead whose leadership applies elsewhere in the university but not in the athletics department," the report said. In that vein, the report called for a "one-plus-three" model in which the "one" (presidential control) is directed toward the "three" -- academic integrity, financial integrity and independent certification.

The NCAA took heed, adopting extensive reform legislation that corresponded with the "one-plus-three" model.

"The 1991 Knight Commission report had several things going for it," said current NCAA President Myles Brand. "It was timely -- it came at a point when we needed a clear statement both about problems and potential solutions."

Brand said the two most important solutions were athletics certification, which is now in its second cycle, and increased presidential control, upon which the current NCAA governance structure is based.

"While certification has served to resolve some of the endemic operational problems in athletics departments, the most important lasting contribution of the first Knight Commission report is the clear statement about the role CEOs have to play," Brand said. "It was wise advice, and I believe presidents at universities see it the same way. In fact, it is the cornerstone of the current reform movement."

"The Knight Commission did have a huge role in 1991," said Kent State University President Carol Cartwright, who chairs the NCAA Executive Committee. "The group's recommendations were plausible -- people could imagine themselves getting from here to there even though it was sometimes a tough path. The commission was providing realistic ideas that struck a chord as being responsive to the issues."

Special-interest groups

But reforms generated by the Knight Commission did not provide closure to the nagging abuses inherent in big-time college sports. As Carter said, "However impressive the list of reforms is, what's equally impressive is the large gap between what has been reformed and what needs to be reformed, which seems to remain at least constant. Either something else pops up or we get recurrences."

Thus, the commission reconvened two years ago, joining a spate of other groups seeking similar influence.

"Intercollegiate athletics tends to attract a lot of attention from a lot of different areas," said Drake Group founder Jon Ericson. "Most of the external groups wanting reforms are driven by specific interests or experiences."

Such was the case with the Drake Group, Ericson said. Long a proponent for universities disclosing academic records of student-athletes, Ericson and his Drake Group peers began to grow weary of intercollegiate athletics being compromised by what Ericson calls "the fundamental lie."

"You bring in young men and women who are absolutely not prepared for higher education and then give them a 30-hour per week job (athletics), have them miss seven or eight classes and come dead tired to others and pronounce you're going to provide them a first-class education. In my professional judgment, you can't do that," Ericson maintains.

As the Drake Group seeks academic integrity, two other groups are after increased student-athlete welfare.

The Collegiate Athletes Coalition made instant headlines several years ago when it developed an alliance with the United Steelworkers of America, which sent signals of perhaps wanting to unionize student-athletes. NCAA representatives, including members of the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, had planned to meet with the CAC, but talks broke down when CAC members openly criticized the NCAA on "60 Minutes," calling the Association's student-athlete advisory committee structure "useless" and a "waste of time."

Then-Division I SAAC Chair Michael Aguirre said while the CAC's union influence was troubling, its unwillingness to work within the NCAA structure was worse. "We've encouraged cooperative efforts with outside groups before," Aguirre said, "but the CAC's actions prompted us to determine it was inappropriate to meet."

Timmons, the former Kansas track coach who founded the National Student-Athletes' Rights Movement in 2002, also advocated for student-athlete benefits. He sent a 64-page booklet proposing a student-athlete bill of rights to athletics directors and presidents. Then-NCAA President Cedric W. Dempsey responded to Timmons, saying his effort was a positive influence on the NCAA and that his document would be distributed to the three student-athlete advisory committees.

Interestingly, though there are similar issues among the external groups, there seems to be little concentrated effort among them to effect change. "As is usual," the Knight Foundation's Carter said, "there are elements of mutual respect and elements of mutual suspicion among these different groups. There are always those who think that the only way you can change a bad situation is pull it out and start over. Then there are people who think that you can reform, and there are others who think you can trim the edges and take care of it. You've got all three of those tendencies reflected in some of the groups trying to influence the NCAA."

Cooperation, not confrontation

Though some of the external forces are highly critical of the NCAA's ability to institute reform, the NCAA has tried to cooperate with them, especially since most groups ultimately are composed of stakeholders in the intercollegiate athletics enterprise.

"Every member of the first Knight Commission had personal experience with intercollegiate sports as athletes, administrators or trustees," said Bill Friday, who co-chaired that first commission and is now president emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "That group really did recognize that sport is a valuable part of the college experience. None of those people would say then or now that intercollegiate sports -- as some people charge -- is only a big money-making scheme."

And the NCAA benefited from the Knight Commission's push. Carter said the commission gave those within the NCAA who were bent on reform the impetus they needed to move forward. "Any concentration of power needs forceful outside criticism, often to give the reformers within it maneuvering room," he said. "We continue to think of the Knight Commission as the place reform began, but the place it's ultimately going to have to end is the NCAA."

In other words, Carter said, the NCAA -- despite its bureaucratic nature -- is the right reform driver.

"I'm not willing to draw the conclusion that the NCAA can't accomplish its mission," he said. "When you have a vehicle, you don't just park it on the side of the road and go try to find another one. The NCAA is the one place and the most logical place to make the reform effort."

Presidents from the recently established group of six conferences might agree, though some observes might wonder why that group chose to be an "outside influence" when it was composed of inside members. Those six conferences have representation on the Board of Directors, which is the in-house reform agency in Division I.

"The group of six is a little different than some of the other outside groups," said Brit Kirwan, the chancellor for the University of Maryland system. "From the very outset it was a collaborative effort. There was no attempt by the group of six to go around the NCAA. And the NCAA reached out to that group to ensure good communication and interaction."

Kirwan, who chaired the Board of Directors at the time the group of six formed, maintains the collaboration was healthy and that the group of six played a role in the Board Task Force, a group Kirwan appointed to shepherd the reform movement through the structure.

'Welcome the counsel'

"Representatives from the group of six came to the Board Task Force meetings at that time, and they continue to attend today," Kirwan said. "That collaboration has worked extremely well in moving the reform agenda along."

Most who ponder the proliferation of outside influences on the NCAA cite the importance of college sports to the American way of life as the reason, not because the NCAA is ill-equipped or incapable of achieving its mission on its own.

"College sports is a tremendous way for us as a society to express the values we believe in," said University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who currently chairs the Board of Directors. "You name something that's dear to the heart -- free enterprise, competitive markets, winning and losing honorably. It shouldn't surprise us that we have all this attention given to athletics. (College athletics) gives us a way to express ourselves as a nation that if we didn't have, we'd have to invent it.

"The smart thing for us to do as an organization is to welcome the counsel. The fact that these groups have proliferated merely confirms the importance of the NCAA within American life and within higher education, and we should welcome their comments and ideas the same way we welcome criticism and ideas about our universities on a daily basis."

Kirwan said the emergence of these groups is a reflection of genuine concern people have about the excesses in intercollegiate athletics. That concern not only gets the reform movement started, it also keeps it moving.

"It is a reminder to the NCAA that it's very important that the reform agenda move forward with all dispatch," he said. "The NCAA is making progress and we have good and meaningful proposals on the table. We need to move them along at a pace that will convince people that the NCAA is serious about maintaining programs with high integrity."

Kent State's Cartwright said the outside influences have propagated because "these groups believe they can bring some different wisdom to the discussion because they're not part of the regulatory or membership organization." She said sometimes an interested third party can help the membership see things it otherwise wouldn't from the inside.

Cartwright, in fact, was a member of the second Knight Commission, which issued its report in 2001. "There's value in legitimate outside groups trying to promote an established organization such as the NCAA," she said.

Rather than resist the suggestions for change, or to find them confrontational, Brand said the NCAA can best be served by working cooperatively with other interested groups.

"Reform movements in intercollegiate athletics are cyclical," Brand said. "There's been one every 20 years or so since athletics became an important entity in the latter part of the 19th century. The NCAA itself is the result of a reform movement.

"Whenever you have a set of problems that generates a reform movement, there's going to be more than one group of people with a perspective on it. So it's not unusual to find there are multiple groups engaged."

What might be unusual, though, is to have such divergent groups wanting the same end result. In this case, Brand said academic reform is the common thread that ties today's collection of outside influences together, even more so than in 1991.

"Athletics has clearly grown and blossomed over the years -- it's an even bigger enterprise now than in 1991 -- and the complexity of the issues has increased as well," he said. "If we can find common ground and partnerships, the reform movement becomes even more powerful. Handled correctly, this is a very positive step forward.

"Reform is hard to do, and the more good people you have working on the problems, the more likely you are to succeed."

Faculty influence could increase with development of coalition

The most recent group to emerge as a potential influence on the NCAA is the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a collection of faculty senate leaders from Division I-A conferences. Though the faculty voice certainly is not a new influence on the NCAA, the coalition's approach is.

The coalition has identified five areas of concern within intercollegiate athletics that it wants to address over the next several years. As expected with a faculty-based initiative, one is academic reform. Indiana University, Bloomington, professor Bob Eno, who is heading the coalition, said the inroads the NCAA already has made on academic reform, including strengthened eligibility standards and an incentives/disincentives package for academic performance, are garnering coalition support.

Other areas of concern include student-athlete welfare, expenditures in athletics, commercialism in athletics, and governance, particularly, as Eno said, "the way athletics de-
partments come under scrutiny and supervision by other elements of the university -- trustees, presidents and faculty -- we feel there's a more rational way for that interaction to occur."

The coalition's roots are grounded in reform resolutions forwarded by the Big Ten and Pacific-10 Conferences within the last three years. Eno said, however, that those produced little movement, so the next step was to try a mobilize "a greater faculty voice."

"Right now," Eno said, "athletics departments that are doing well tend to resist reform. It's natural for coaches and athletics directors not to want to be constrained any further than they already are by outside groups. And for them, professors are outside groups. That's the strange thing about intercollegiate athletics."

The coalition is seeking help from the Association of Governing Boards (AGB). In fact, the group met with AGB representatives, NCAA President Myles Brand and other NCAA staff April 12 in Chicago. Tom Ingram, president of the AGB, said he is encouraged that faculty are rallying around the reform cause. He also said that the involvement of presidents, under the direction of Brand, is an attraction for the AGB.

"Our presidents and chancellors are in difficult positions on their own campuses with the passions that American people have for sports programs and winning teams," Ingram said. "The AGB's concerns revolve around the need for boards and trustees to support their CEOs and to make sure that everyone is on the same page regarding the responsibility of the president to maintain ethical programs and abide by the rules."

Bill Friday, president emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who co-chaired the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said the recent revelations of academic fraud at high-profile Division I schools make the AGB's involvement at this point a natural fit.

"Trustees are either by law or by charter the people responsible for the conduct of higher education institutions. They're beginning to feel that obligation," Friday said. "When you get to the bottom of an issue like academic fraud, the problem may be with athletics, but the fundamental question is the integrity of the university itself. That's why the trustees and others are beginning to want to see some things change."

NCAA President Brand said as the NCAA has welcomed input from other groups, so will it welcome assistance from the faculty coalition.

"The NCAA has taken the approach of building on the early Knight Commission work and looking for partners in other areas -- both within intercollegiate athletics, such as conferences, and outside, such as the Association of Governing Boards and conference faculty senates," he said. "Such an approach offers us a good opportunity to move forward the reform agenda."

-- Gary T. Brown