Many people might look at me and say, "Grant's all about big-time college football." Well, I do believe in college football at the elite level, but I also see the absolute need for programs to flourish on a smaller scale.

Those of you who follow football may know me through my most recent role as executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and through my 21 years as head coach at Baylor University. I would not trade those experiences for anything, but they do not completely represent my career.

Before I came to Baylor, I was head coach at McMurry College from 1960 to 1965 and Angelo State University from 1969 to 1971. We didn't call those schools "Division III" or "Division II" at the time, but regardless of what we call them now, both still resemble the programs that I coached 30 or 40 years ago. My commitment to my student-athletes and to what we were trying to accomplish was just as great at Angelo State and McMurry as it was at Baylor. To this day, I am proud to have those head coaching assignments on my resume.

Therefore, I feel especially qualified to comment about current conditions in Division II based both on my personal background and on my role as AFCA executive director.

At the 2005 NCAA Convention, Division II delegates will vote on Proposal No. 28, which would reduce the number of football scholarship equivalencies from 36 to 24. I cannot emphasize enough how strongly I oppose this proposal.

I am sure that those who have sponsored this legislation are trying to do the right thing. As much as anybody, I understand the financial pressures that are being experienced by almost every intercollegiate athletics program and by higher education in general.

The fact that we are going through hard times, however, does not automatically point to cutting a third of the financial aid available to our football student-athletes. In fact, I believe that financial aid should be the very last item to be cut since it directly relates to access to higher education. I know that the NCAA Division II Student-Athlete Advisory Committee joins me in that belief.

As this discussion unfolds, I hope we can spend as much time as possible talking about the real problem, which is whether many Division II programs can afford to compete on a national basis in the current structure.

In that regard, I believe the sponsors of Proposal 28 have a valid point. Many schools cannot afford to fund 36 scholarships, and they believe they can't compete with those that do. If you look at Division II football championship games from recent years, you can see a connection between offering more scholarships and reaching the title game.

But does the answer to this inequality of competition lie with reining in the schools that give 36 scholarships? I don't think so. In my mind, such an action is all but certain to force a number of Division II schools into Division I-AA. An outcome like that not only will weaken Division II, it also will contribute to a growing lack of definition about what it means to be a member of Division I.

These are serious issues that go well beyond Division II. The solution certainly does not lie in passing Proposal No. 28, but it does not completely lie in defeating it, although I do strongly recommend that course of action. The answer may be found in looking at the bigger issue of how football and the NCAA division classification system relate to one another.

This is not necessarily a new question. A decade ago, Divisions I and III faced the longstanding controversy of whether a Division I program should be able to classify its football program in Division III. The debate went on for years before Division I voted in 1991 to require Division I members to conduct all of their competition at the Division I level. Thus was born the large subset of Division I nonscholarship football.

What does that have to do with the current situation in Division II? More than you might think. In both Division I and Division II, we now have large numbers of football student-athletes who have little or no hope of competing for a national championship simply because they are positioned in a niche where financial aid limits are unevenly applied.

Why do we keep trying to fit the square peg into the round hole? Why don't we ask the more fundamental question: Can schools be given the opportunity to classify their football programs relatively independently from the rest of their programs? I know that this single question will raise a thousand more questions, but it is one that we must ask.

I believe we do much good for many people and many programs if we keep our eye on two simple goals. The first is to maximize the experience for the student-athletes, and the second is to help schools make responsible decisions about the scope of their entire athletics programs.

As the former coach at Angelo State and McMurry, I worry that we will awaken one day to a world in which we have two kinds of athletics programs: large and nonscholarship. Not only would such a world imperil college athletics, it could have serious ramifications for higher education in general.

NCAA President Myles Brand is right when he talks about the need to address fiscal responsibility in college athletics. When people hear those words, they immediately conclude that the concern is directed only at the largest programs. That is a gross oversimplification because some of our most acute problems are found in the middle of the college athletics spectrum.

But if we can think differently about football, we can create an NCAA in which we have more competitive opportunities and more fiscal responsibility. We can't solve every problem by going down this path, but we can create some positive change if we are willing to break the mold of tradition.

Grant Teaff is executive director of the American Football Coaches Association.