NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- The Division I Board of Directors spent a good portion of its January 12 meeting discussing not only the current state of the academic-reform package in the legislative cycle, but also steps that will be necessary in the near future should the package be approved as expected in April.

Board members heard from the Division I Working Group on Incentives/Disincentives, chaired by former Vanderbilt University Athletics Director Todd Turner, about a "transition plan" and about various details that will need to be addressed in the coming years. The first of those steps was to endorse the appointment of a Committee on Academic Performance (CAP), which will take the baton from the working group and be the body to administer the academic-reform components in the future. The CAP will be a nine-person group composed of at least one CEO, one athletics director, one faculty athletics representative, one senior woman administrator and one conference office representative. The working group also would like to have a provost be a member of the CAP.

Some of the duties the CAP will have to monitor right away will be to establish points in the three APR "filters" at which institutions and programs will be subject to being assessed penalties, and determine whether a proposed "contemporaneous penalty" should apply to student-athletes who have exhausted eligibility.

The contemporaneous penalty would prohibit a team from re-awarding to an incoming prospect the athletics aid of a student-athlete who fails to meet academic eligibility requirements and withdraws from the institution. Board members asked Turner's working group to consider applying that to student-athletes who have exhausted eligibility and then leave school without graduating. One Board member called such cases "one of the NCAA's biggest embarrassments."

Many athletics administrators, however, believe institutions shouldn't be held accountable for those cases, since many are legitimate -- student-athletes who have exhausted eligibility may accept large signing bonuses to go pro, they may get married and leave school, they may depart the institution because family circumstances change, etc.

Turner said the working group talked at length about solutions before recommending further study. In the meantime, he said, the contemporaneous penalty should continue to exempt student-athletes who have exhausted eligibility. "Data continues to be collected to help determine the scope of the issue, and to make decisions on these cases before collecting all the data would be a mistake," Turner said.

Turner told the Board, though, that there is reason to believe the number of exhausted-eligibility departures will decrease simply because of the new progress-toward-degree standards now in place that require student-athletes to have completed 80 percent of their academic requirements by the end of their fourth year.

"The enhanced eligibility standards will change the behavior of student-athletes and move them closer to graduation at the end of their fourth year," he said. "The new 40-60-80 progression puts athletes so close to graduation after the fourth year that we think the graduation rates will increase. But we need more data to verify that."

-- Gary T. Brown