The Division I Board of Directors gave researchers the green light to begin collecting data on which to base future rewards and penalties for teams' success in meeting academic-performance standards, but the presidents displayed caution regarding a more immediate aspect of academic reform.

During their August 7 meeting in Indianapolis, Board members approved a proposal that provides for the collection of eligibility, retention and graduation data for all sports teams beginning with the 2003-04 academic year. That will be the first year of the rolling four-year data set on which most of the incentives/disincentives package will be based. But presidents paused on a proposal that might have applied penalties in fall 2004 based on the 2003-04 academic data.

That proposal would prohibit institutions from re-awarding a scholarship from a student-athlete who fails to meet eligibility standards and withdraws from the school to an incoming prospect. The so-called "contemporaneous" penalty is regarded as a companion piece to the more longitudinal incentives/disincentives component based on four years of data.

The Division I Management Council had urged the Board to commit to the contemporaneous-penalty concept by notifying all Division I institutions of the Board's intent to adopt the proposal in April 2004 (with an effective date of August 1, 2004). That would have put the membership on notice that the contemporaneous penalty would be in place beginning in fall 2004, meaning that the academic performance of student-athletes this coming year would be subject to the penalty.

But Board members favored a more conservative approach. They didn't mind beginning the data collection this year, but they believed more notice was appropriate. The Board agreed that it would still vote on the proposal in April 2004, but that -- if approved -- penalties would be based on data from the 2004-05 academic year. That means the earliest that the contemporaneous penalty could be applied would be fall 2005.

"We felt it was necessary to begin collecting data that will guide Division I when it fully adopts an incentives/disincentives policy for 2007, but we also wanted to inform institutions of our intention that some contemporaneous penalties could be considered before 2007," said Robert Hemenway, chair of the Board and chancellor at the University of Kansas. "Those penalties will be voted on in April but not applied until fall 2005 at the earliest."

As a way of helping institutions understand the ramifications of the contemporaneous penalty, Board members also agreed to inform schools about what the consequences would have been based on the 2003-04 data without actually applying any penalties. That way, coaches and administrators would see first-hand the kinds of eligibility and retention circumstances they are being asked to avoid.

Calculation of academic rate

Board members also discussed the metric that will frame the incentives/disincentives package. Known as the Annual Academic and Retention Rate (AARR), the measure being proposed provides a term-by-term assessment of every team's academic performance by awarding one point per term for student-athlete eligibility and one point for retention.

The Board, emphasizing that presidents care most about student-athlete graduation, talked about working graduation into the calculation, perhaps by awarding bonus points to graduates in addition to the points they contribute to the AARR through academic progress and retention. The current proposed rate does not take graduation into consideration.

Vanderbilt University Athletics Director Todd Turner, who chairs the group charged with developing the incentives/disincentives structure, said members considered including graduation in the point calculation, but because retention proved statistically to be the best indicator of graduation, they felt that adding graduation only complicated the rate. In other words, Turner's group believed the simple calculation of eligibility plus retention was as good or better at predicting graduation than any other combination (weighted or otherwise) of the variables.

Still, some Board members were disappointed that the proposed metric doesn't reward graduation enough, even though a student-athlete who graduates would contribute the maximum two points for his or her final term of eligibility and retention. "Despite what statistics say about retention as a predictor of graduation, how can we say we support academic reform without rewarding graduation?" one Board member said.

The Board also expressed concern about the three "filters" that would be applied to teams once the AARR is calculated: one comparing a team to all other teams in all sports; another comparing a team to all other teams in that sport only; and a third comparing a team to that school's student body. Board members discussed whether those filters should be applied simultaneously or sequentially, noting that they strongly preferred the former.

Turner said he would take the Board's concerns back to his working group for further review, noting that his group and the Board had two years to work with before determining the "cut points" in the AARR. That two-year window will allow researchers to gauge the impact of the enhanced progress-toward-degree standards (40-60-80) in place for this year's entering class and give Board members a better picture of what constitutes acceptable performance.

Other business

In other action, the Board adopted the following pieces of emergency legislation that had been approved by the Management Council at the Council's July meeting: Proposal Nos. 03-20, 03-54, 03-55, 03-57, 03-58, 03-68, 03-115 and 03-117 (see the August 4 issue of The NCAA News for a summary of the proposals).

The Board also agreed to table Proposal No. 03-53 (dead period in women's basketball) to allow for more discussion and review other elements of the proposal related to the number of coaches who may recruit. The Board also tabled Proposal No. 03-56 regarding certified basketball events for NCAA institutions in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico pending litigation regarding the "two-in-four" rule.