Wayne Duke, former commissioner
Big Ten Conference
USA Today

Discussing the 20-year anniversary of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared the NCAA was violating antitrust laws by negotiating national TV deals and determining how many times college football teams could appear on TV:

"The state of college football today is the direct result of that decision, including the arms-race mentality, conference realignments, money pressures, the dilution of rules and regulations. The spelling of 'principal' was changed to 'principle.' "

Loren Matthews, ABC senior vice-president for programming
USA Today

Discussing a "four-plus-one" Bowl Championship Series formula to determine a Division I-A football champion that was proposed but rejected by BCS conference presidents:

"ABC did propose a four-plus-one. That was our favorite solution. What ultimately was decided was not the format TV would have picked. It was not the best for ABC and college football. We're kidding ourselves if we think there's always going to be two undefeated teams at the end of the season. This system is improved, but as long as we don't have plus-one, it still is vulnerable. Unfortunately, we don't set the rules, but we play by them."

Sports marketing

John Egan, managing director of colleges and universities with the Coca-Cola Company
Athletics Administration

Discussing changes in marketing over the years from a sponsor's perspective:

"The marketing capabilities of athletics departments have become more sophisticated and their needs have become more complex. Ten years ago, a department could include pouring rights and scoreboard signage as part of a campus-wide agreement and both sides would be satisfied. Now, there are more options and more opportunities. We need to challenge one another to create flexible, dynamic agreements that allow us to market together to both win in our respective marketplaces."

Admissions

Eugene M. Tobin, senior advisor
Mellon Foundation
Chronicle of Higher Education

Discussing a Foundation-funded project to study whether student-athletes who are admitted to the university have the same range of academic credentials as other students:

"It's very hard, when you're serving as a college president, to be sure you're getting an accurate degree of information about your own athletics program, because you're always hearing anecdotal stories about the handful of students who are truly exceptional. These stories are quite true, but unless you're able to look at the data and have someone explain that data to you, you won't get as full a picture of the athletics experience as you need."

The collegiate model

Mark Emmert, president
University of Washington
Tacoma News Tribune

"The model of intercollegiate athletics is probably not one that we would reinvent exactly the same conditions in today. I don't want to get too historical or philosophical about it, but American universities are the only ones on the planet that evolved sport alongside their academic institutions, so it's a bit of an anomaly in that sense. But it is nonetheless quintessentially American. ...

"I'd probably like to see (intercollegiate athletics) a little more collegial, a lot less expensive, a lot less demanding of the time and attention of the young people who participate in it, so that they can be more integrated into the fabric of the university. We all strive for that, but none of us fully achieve it. ...

"Sport becomes this enormously powerful lens through which people see and reflect on your university. They use it as a proxy -- grossly inaccurate, but nonetheless a proxy -- of what the university is about. So if the football team, for example, is doing very well, and the players and the coaches represent the values of the university -- they're well behaved, they're good students, they're people of good character, they're highly competitive and they're winning -- then those are exactly the things that people think about the university."