The working group created to develop an incentives/disincentives structure designed to enhance the academic performance of Division I student-athletes has begun work on a "white paper" that will provide a framework for future discussion.

The group, composed of Management Council members and others within the Division I membership and chaired by Vanderbilt University Athletics Director Todd Turner, convened just three days after the end of the 2003 NCAA
Convention, during which the incentives/disincentives package was a frequent topic. The concept was high among the priorities NCAA President Myles Brand spoke of in his inaugural State of the Association speech, and it was among issues discussed by the Board of Directors Task Force and at the Division I forum January 13.

The incentives/disincentives package represents the next phase of a Division I academic reform initiative driven by presidents and chancellors. The first step was a series of strengthened initial- and continuing-eligibility standards adopted by the Board of Directors last fall. The incentives/disincentives effort follows that up by rewarding or penalizing individual teams and/or athletics programs based on how well they meet an established academic performance standard. That measuring stick, called an Annual Academic Progress Rate (AAPR), is in the process of being developed, largely from a pilot study being compiled on the academic performance of Division I student-athletes (transfers included) over the past six years.

The AAPR will be a more accurate "real-time" evaluation of academic performance than the current federally mandated graduation-rates report, which provides only a six-year review and counts transfers or others who left in good academic standing against individual school totals.

The incentives/disincentives working group spent much of its meeting considering a preliminary structure that leverages academic performance against the "assets" of the Association. Those assets include access to (1) NCAA postseason competition, (2) a full array of athletics scholarships and (3) NCAA revenues.

In order to develop rewards and penalties based on those assets, the working group established a number of goals for the incentives/disincentives structure to achieve. The primary goals are to stimulate improved academic performance from all student-athletes, and to do so in a way that is more encouraging than punitive. Both are challenging. Critics of the concept, coaches and media among them, have speculated that the academic reform effort uses an all-sports cover to specifically target football and men's basketball, sports with traditionally low graduation rates. Those same people also worry that a disincentives package only adds to the NCAA's regulatory, punitive image.

Turner agreed that the public and media, and even some NCAA members, believe that the incentives/disincentives package is aimed at football and basketball because those are high-profile sports with low-profile academic track records. "But we can't let that distract us from our bigger charge, which relates to all student-athletes in every sport," he said.

Turner also urged patience from those who might otherwise jump to conclusions about the initiative. "People don't have all the facts yet," he said. "The normal measures of academic success, such as graduation rates, which have received so much publicity, are not going to be the same anymore. There will be different ways of measuring progress. Coaches and columnists who have gotten out front on this and have been critical have jumped the gun a bit, because they just don't know yet what the metric is. We're going to be determining that (the AAPR) in the next few months.

"We need the naysayers to be patient until they know the measurements we'll be using."

A proposed structure

Though discussions are preliminary, and though the AAPR Turner referred to probably won't be pinned down until May, the working group considered a possible incentives/disincentives structure that might apply to whatever standard for academic performance is established. The structure, which is being forwarded primarily to stimulate discussion, will be presented to the Board of Directors Task Force later this month for further review. It contains the following components:

Turner said the combination of an incremental incentive structure and more contemporaneous options is important in order to give the entire package the desired effect.

"The incremental approach will only affect the habitual underperformers, which is our highest priority," he said. "The first group we want to encourage obviously is the one that shows a consistent pattern of academic underachievement."

Those incentives and disincentives will be the ones that most factor in the AAPR. But the package also will contain the more immediate caveat of perhaps restricting scholarships based on poor academic performance in a given year, though Turner cautioned against a broad-brush approach in that regard. "What we don't want to do is heavily penalize an 'unusual' year in which teams may have suffered abnormally heavy -- and legitimate -- attrition or underperformance."

That's among reasons why the structure would include an appeals process.

Turner also stressed that the structure was preliminary and that the working group had not gone into detail about applying the structure to even hypothetical cases.

"We've simply said there are two areas we need to focus on," he said. "There's the historical metric that has to be validated with data that is accumulated over time and measured against some norm, and there's the real-time metric that can be measured year by year, starting immediately."

Ultimately, working group members, and the presidents who appointed them, want a package that strengthens the recruiting and admissions culture for schools, both right away and over time.

The preliminary plan is to issue the first "report card" during the fall of 2004 for all Division I institutions, assessing the previous year of academic performance.

Rapid progress

The working group will continue to develop these ideas before formally submitting a preliminary document to the Management Council and Board of Directors in April. The so-called "white paper" will then be distributed to Division I conferences and other organizations for review and feedback. Legislative proposals would appear before the Council in October 2003, followed by the membership comment period, which would include discussion at the 2004 NCAA Convention. Under that timeline, the Board of Directors would be in position to take final action on an incentives/disincentives package in April 2004.

Turner said this spring and summer would be a critical time for the Division I membership to review and comment on the package. But he also emphasized that the fact presidents are behind the initiative is an indication of why progress so far has been swift. Turner's group, a diverse collection that includes commissioners, athletics directors, faculty athletics representatives and senior woman administrators, has enjoyed a quick start at the Board of Directors' urging.

"Division I presidents and chancellors have said the current culture is unacceptable," Turner said. "The message is that this is part of the academic reform package that presidents want and they want us to get it done. It's no longer a matter of whether this will happen, but how.

"If you were to ask people if we should be concerned about the academic progress of student-athletes, there's not a coach or administrator out there who would say we shouldn't. But if you were to ask those same people if we should penalize people for not graduating their student-athletes, you'll get a totally different response.

"We need to be more in line with the first way of thinking. Let's not think about us penalizing people for not graduating student-athletes, let's think about how we can encourage behavior that leads to students' academic success. After all, we are academic institutions. We're not the NBA; we're not the NFL. We have a broader mission here, and we've strayed from it. So let's figure it out. How can we encourage people to help our students succeed? That's the bottom line."

Working Group Members