The Division II Championships Eligibility Project Team has moved far from its starting point, but after two meetings, it still has a long way to go before it reaches the finish line.

The group met June 24-25 in Indianapolis and rediscovered the difficulty of its task: examining how to make more certain that institutions are using only eligible student-athletes in postseason competition while supporting the "student-athlete friendly" environment directed by NCAA President Myles Brand.

Ultimately, the group reached consensus on a number of broad themes even if it didn't agree on the details. In particular, on the key area of penalties for using ineligible student-athletes, the project team agreed that:

Institutional fines are an appropriate punishment for certain kinds of offenses.

A system that nullifies contests for championships-selection purposes is superior to one that employs forfeits or one that calls upon sports committees to evaluate how much a team benefited from the use of an ineligible student-athlete.

The Division II Championships Committee should have the authority to place institutions on "championships probation" for repeatedly using ineligible student-athletes in postseason play.

While those and other areas of agreement provided an idea of the group's general direction, they did not point precisely to what the eventual recommendations will be. With that in mind, project team Chair David Riggins, athletics director at Mars Hill College, said that the group will not be sponsoring legislation for the January Convention in Dallas. Instead, Riggins wants to use fall conference meetings and the 2005 Convention as forums at which exchanges of ideas can be accomplished between the project team and the membership.

The penalty questions illustrated the challenges that face the project team and, ultimately, the Division II membership. With regard to fines, the group generally agreed that $250 was an appropriate base fine, yet it had trouble reaching consensus on exactly what offenses would trigger fines, what the fine limit might be, whether fines should be ramped up under certain circumstances, whether fines should be mitigated for those who report at the earliest opportunity and whether a fine system (and other penalties) potentially discourages the self-reporting of eligibility problems.

Likewise, the project team agreed with the concept of a nullification system that would dock a team a predetermined percentage for each use of an ineligible student-athlete. While the project team appeared to believe that such a system was far superior to forfeits or to asking sports committees to ascertain how much a team benefited from the use of an ineligible player, it also led to the obvious question of what the nullification percentage should be. A figure of .025 seemed to be favored -- for example, a team with a .750 winning percentage that used an ineligible player for 10 games would be adjusted to .500 [.750 minus .250 (10 games times the .025 nullification percentage)] -- but the group struggled with whether the nullification penalty should be applied to all contests during which the ineligible student-athlete competed or only to games the team won while using that athlete. To help understand that issue, the project team asked the NCAA statistics staff to develop examples of how nullification would work in both cases, along with illustrations of whether such an approach would play out differently in sports with greatly different numbers of contests (10 or 11 in football vs. 50 in baseball, for example).

Finally, the project team seemed to agree that institutions determined to have used ineligible student-athletes in championships competition should be placed on championships probation and that teams that violate their probation should be suspended. Questions were raised about the terms of probation and suspension, along with how appeals might be structured.

Despite the challenges, the project team found substantial areas of agreement. It generally supported a set of guiding principles relating to championships eligibility and agreed that the division likely would benefit from requiring institutions to flag any eligibility issues that have arisen during each academic year (similar to other groups, the project team resisted any approach that would demand any kind of midyear recertification of student-athletes). It also agreed that greater education could be achieved though the increased use of the Division II Compliance Assistant program and through the development of a Division II compliance Web site. In addition, it agreed that an eligibility audit of selected Division II national champions would send the wrong message, although it noted that such an approach eventually could become necessary if other methods are not effective.

The problem facing the group is as much about political realities than about finding the "right" answers. In fact, any number of solutions could be effective in some ways while causing liabilities in others. The challenge is to find a set of recommendations that will do the most good and that will be acceptable to a majority of the membership. In that regard, this assignment may be akin to the task the division faced when it addressed Division II membership classification issues in 2002.

Riggins acknowledged that the expectation when the project team was authorized at the 2004 Convention was that it would produce legislative proposals for the 2005 Convention. However, he believes that a rushed approach is both needless and dangerous.

"The most important thing is for us to do it right," Riggins said. "An iron-clad schedule may not be what we need. I don't want us to be pressured into developing legislation simply because we're out of time."