NCAA President Myles Brand called it a "sea change." University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway said it was "a significant event in the history of the NCAA." Knight Commission Chair William C. Friday applauded it as a historic milestone.

"It" was the Division I Board of Directors' April 29 adoption of some of the most sweeping academic reforms in the NCAA's near-100-year history. On that day in Indianapolis, Board members implemented a structure by which institutions would be accountable for the improved academic performance of their student-athletes. Tougher initial-eligibility and progress-toward-degree standards had been adopted the year before, and now a disincentives package -- complete with penalties for academically under-performing teams -- would provide the accountability fulcrum upon which the future academic integrity of Division I athletics programs would rest.

The Board meeting perhaps closed the book on a reform movement two decades in the making. From the formation of the NCAA Presidents Commission in 1984 and the groundbreaking Knight Commission report in 1991 to the 2001 appointment of the Board Task Force that was charged with developing a workable plan, presidents and chancellors sought guarantees for higher graduation rates and lower academic attrition. What the Board approved should accomplish both.

Anchored by the newly created Academic Progress Rate, a real-time assessment of every Division I team's academic performance, the system promotes student-athletes who are likely to graduate -- and it holds institutions accountable for making sure they do. Significant in the package is the establishment of the Division I Committee on Academic Performance (CAP) to monitor the program and help determine the "cut points" at which teams' academic performance is deemed unacceptable. Two penalty structures -- a contemporaneous model designed to encourage a quick behavior adjustment and a harsher historically based set of punishments that will hurt if the behavior is ignored -- provide the landmark accountability.

Kansas Chancellor Hemenway, who chairs the Board, said after the meeting that by adopting those reforms, Division I presidents were fulfilling the NCAA's educational mission.

"We can't do that without having tough academic standards and without sending a clear message to student-athletes that if you come to our institutions to participate in intercollegiate athletics, we're going to do everything under our power to make sure you graduate," he said. "What we did today will result in enhanced standards, improved measurements in how successfully those standards are being met, and

increased accountability on the part of institutions, athletics departments, teams and student-athletes."

CAP Chair and Board member Walter Harrison, president at the University of Hartford, said the Board put the exclamation point on a watershed period during which presidents took control of intercollegiate athletics.

"It was the culmination of a long process during which presidents said, first, we're taking responsibility for the conduct of our athletics programs and, second, we are going to take responsibility for the academic performance of our student-athletes," Harrison said.

"You can take responsibility for their academic performance in two ways, and the Board now has done both of them. One is to require higher standards for entrance and for progress toward degree -- which establishes a new set of criteria for the individual student-athlete. The second -- and I find this to be really important -- is to say we as institutions are equally responsible for the general academic performance of our student-athletes."

Reform in all divisions

Indeed, when it comes to chronicling the Association's history, 2004 will be in bold type. All three divisions, not only Division I, made academic reform a priority this year.

Division II's primary academic reform for 2004 helped to make certain that all student-athletes -- both enrolled athletes and transfers -- are making academic progress term by term. Proposal No. 23, approved at the 2004 NCAA Convention, will require student-athletes to have successfully completed six credit hours from the previous term.

Previously, currently enrolled student-athletes retained eligibility by passing an average of 12 hours per semester. To meet that standard, some student-athletes were neglecting their studies during their season of competition, overloading the other term and making up the difference in the summer (for instance, no hours in the fall, 18 hours in the spring and six in the summer). Proposal No. 23 will stop that practice.

While the sponsors of the legislation cited a positive effect on enrolled student-athletes, the proposal was directed primarily at transfers. The previous standard essentially permitted student-athletes to transfer if the originating institution certified that they would have been eligible to compete. A high-profile infractions case revealed that some student-athletes were permitted to transfer even though it should have been clear to both the originating and transferring institutions that the student-athletes' academic backgrounds were deficient. The approval of Proposal No. 23 makes the standard much more tangible.

Division III, which traditionally has not set academic standards for its members, adopted landmark reforms at the 2004 Convention to seek to ensure that student-athletes are treated -- academically and otherwise -- like every other student enrolled at Division III institutions.

New legislation generally reducing the length of playing seasons and specifically reducing practice and competition in the nontraditional segment sought to achieve what Convention delegate Dan DiBiasio, president of Wilmington College (Ohio), called "more balance" in student-athletes' lives -- more time to focus on academics, as well as other extracurricular pursuits.

Division III members also endorsed the elimination of redshirting, thus limiting student-athletes to four seasons of athletics competition and practice. "Eliminating redshirting encourages degree completion and eliminates the pressure on student-athletes to prolong the years that a student spends at our institutions for athletics reasons," Division III Management Council member Leon Lunder, athletics director at Carleton College, said on the Convention floor.

2005: Year of implementation

With all of that behind Divisions I, II and III members, the tasks ahead remain daunting. Particularly in Division I, now that the ambitious academic-reform structure has been approved, the trick is to implement it. That shifts the focus from the Board of Directors, which in 2004 adopted the model, to the Committee on Academic Performance, which in 2005 must assemble it.

Harrison said the CAP's job "is to devise the mechanisms by which the NCAA -- as a group of member institutions -- holds individual members accountable for the academic success of their student-athletes."

The first mechanism is to determine at what point athletics teams are subject to "contemporaneous penalties," or the inability to replace scholarships of student-athletes who leave the institution and would not have been academically eligible had they returned. The concept of contemporaneous penalties was developed after the Board realized that the historically based disincentives wouldn't become effective until four years of Academic Progress Rate data were compiled. Presidents wanted something that would provide a more real-time behavior adjustment to complement the long-term measures.

Harrison said the contemporaneous penalties actually are rehabilitative. They are the "shot across the bow," he said, and serve to alert institutions that their programs are on the wrong retention and academic-progress path. To that end, Harrison said the penalties probably shouldn't wield as heavy a hammer as the historically based disincentives, which are designed to identify the chronic under-performers and punish them accordingly.

But there has been discussion so far in setting the cut point at which teams are subject to contemporaneous penalties fairly high, perhaps at an APR score that would translate to a 50 percent graduation rate. (The APR scores will be used as the established benchmark for purposes of establishing a cut score, and APR scores will, over time, become meaningful numbers to the membership and general public. However, at present, APR scores do not have significant meaning to policy-makers, and so for purposes of discussion, APR scores have been translated to graduation rates.)

The thinking there is to ensure that as many teams as possible are encouraged to improve their academic performance -- not just the lowest quadrant.

At that 50 percent mark, however, preliminary APR data from 2003 indicate that the contemporaneous penalties would have caused several football and men's basketball teams to lose multiple scholarships. That forced CAP members to take into account how much of an effect they wanted the contemporaneous penalties to have, and whether that effect was fair when applied to teams of different sizes. For example, is the effect of losing three of 85 full grants-in-aid in football the same as losing three of 13 full rides in men's basketball?

That has prompted the CAP to consider a cap -- a governor on the amount of aid that would be included in the penalty. That way, the contemporaneous penalties would serve as a catalyst to create change over the next several years where performance lags, but would not be overly punitive. CAP members have considered a limit of 5 percent of the maximum value of athletically related financial aid permitted to be awarded to a team for an academic year.

Also being considered is a two-tiered approach in which the 5 percent limit would be in place for teams within a certain APR range, and a stronger penalty (for example, 10 percent) for teams that are performing at the very bottom portion of the APR.

That's not the only complexity facing the CAP. Other issues include how institutional mission factors into the contemporaneous-penalty equation. One alternative under consideration is a "filter" that would provide relief in cases where the team's APR is below the cut but on par with the institutional graduation rate.

With all those factors to consider, Harrison said the CAP's most daunting challenge is not where to establish the cut points, but to ensure that it's fair.

"Institutional mission is an important consideration," he said. "So are the complexities regarding squad size. It's just different thinking about a Division I-A football team with 85 players and a Division I men's golf team with six, of whom only four have scholarships. Our considering a cap to compensate for that discrepancy doesn't mean we're watering down reform; on the contrary, it means we want to be fair and take into consideration overriding concerns.

"What's interesting as chair is seeing that we're 'surrounded on both sides' by people who doubt what we're doing. On the one side we have people who say we're watering the system down too much, and on the other side we have people who say this is too strict and will hurt too many teams. That leads me to believe we're doing it right. If we have people on both sides squealing, we're probably going down the right path."

The CAP is expected to make final recommendations to the Board about these issues in January.

January also is when the first set of APR data will be distributed. Though no penalties will be applied based on data from 2003-04, schools will be able to see where their teams' academic performance compares in the aggregate, and how many contemporaneous penalties they would have been subjected to. Actual penalties won't be applied until next fall based on a combination of 2003-04 and 2004-05 APR data.

Once the system for applying the contemporaneous penalties in place, the CAP will have to begin working on the historically based penalties, work that might bleed into 2006.

The CAP also has not abandoned the idea of establishing incentives in addition to the disincentives imbedded in the academic-reform structure. Though the latter have received much more attention, Harrison said his group still intends to propose a series of rewards for teams that perform above the established standards.

Divisions II and III still have work to do this coming year as well. The question of transfer standards continues to be a major issue in Division II. At the 2005 Convention, delegates will vote on a proposal from the Great Lakes Valley and Northeast-10 Conferences that effectively would prevent Division I student-athletes with only one season of eligibility remaining to transfer to Division II institutions. The Management and Presidents Councils will oppose the proposal in the belief that it would be unfair to student-athletes who are transferring for legitimate reasons. The Management and Presidents Councils will continue to address the issue and hope to offer a legislative solution at the 2006 NCAA Convention.

In Division III, even though no one currently is discussing legislative proposals specifically addressing academic issues, it seems likely that institutions will continue to consider whether their practices are in line with Division III philosophy, which places "the highest priority on the overall quality of the educational experience and on the successful completion of all students' academic programs."

Division III institutions responding to a membership survey that will be discussed at the 2005 Convention strongly supported that philosophy. They also indicated support for statements that "admissions policies for student-athletes should be consistent with the general student body" and "the academic performance of student-athletes should be, at a minimum, consistent with the general student body."

In that sense, 2005 figures to be as academically based for all three divisions as 2004. It may not be a "sea change" or a "significant event," but it will be the implementation of landmark practices that made the Association's 99th year 100 percent historic.

David Pickle and Jack Copeland also contributed to this story.

Principles to consider

What the Division I Committee on Academic Performance and the Board of Directors must consider in determining the application of contemporaneous penalties:

• How should contemporaneous penalties work in conjunction with historically based penalties?

• Using an APR score, where should the "cut line" be set for contemporaneous penalties?

• Should the cut score capture a greater number of teams (for example, 30 percent of all teams) so as to encourage academic improvement among the lowest third of the distribution? Or, should the penalties affect a smaller percentage of teams, so as to warn only those teams expected to fail the historically based filters?

• Should a cap be placed on the maximum number of scholarships that can be lost due to contemporaneous penalties?

• Should the contemporaneous penalty structure differentiate between "extremely low performers" and "low performers"?

• Should an institution's mission be considered in the contemporaneous penalty phase?

• Should consideration of mission result in no penalties for an otherwise penalized team, or should the applicable penalty merely be reduced? For example, if a team is subject to a scholarship penalty of two scholarships without considering mission, should the team's penalty be eliminated or reduced to one scholarship if the team in question is performing better than the general student body at that institution?