It’s no secret that athletics directors are a competitive bunch. They compete for excellence in their programs, for dollars to support those programs, and for the resources and exposure that make the student-athlete experience at their institutions the best it can be.

So it should come as no surprise that when a ranking is thrown into the mix, ADs will compete for that, too. The United States Sports Academy Directors’ Cup, developed by the athletics directors’ own organization — the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics — adds proof to that competitive pudding.

When it was established in 1993, the Cup’s creators probably didn’t foresee it evolving into the competition that it is today. At the time, the ranking mechanism — the first national all-sports recognition award — was a way for NACDA to generate some sponsorship revenue and in the same stroke publicize achievement in broad-based athletics programming.

Today, an athletics program’s standing in the Cup is so important that it is included in many athletics directors’ contracts. What began 13 years ago as an innocuous ranking has become, at least in some cases, a pressure-packed evaluation tool.

Lee McElroy, the AD at University at Albany and NACDA first vice president, says the organization inadvertently created a monster.

“From NACDA’s perspective, all we wanted to do from the start was reward excellence in broad-based programs,” he said. “It has now created a monster of its own, if you will, because it is used as a benchmark or metric to determine whether programs are successful.”

That outcome is nobody’s fault.

The first ranking was relatively simple. The Division I-only list included 22 sports — 10 each for men and women and one “wild-card” sport for each gender — and it employed a simple scoring system that awarded 64 points to the winner and one fewer to each subsequent finisher.

People liked it. It earned schools — and NACDA — publicity. It gave the Cup’s first sponsor — Sears Roebuck and Company — a valuable entrée into the college sports demographic. The ranking was so successful that in just two years, Divisions II and III and the NAIA were added. Sears ponied up enough sponsorship dollars that NACDA was able to build a meaningful postgraduate scholarship program that awarded $5,000 grants to 20 at-large students annually and smaller grants to students at schools with championship teams.

But as the ranking’s popularity grew, so did the pressure to be ranked. ADs began putting bonus clauses in coaches’ contracts for a team’s Cup standing. If coaches didn’t like that, then ADs certainly didn’t like it when their presidents started doing the same thing to them.

“It is not unusual to hear college presidents say upon announcing their new AD that they expect to get to the NCAA tournament every so often and finish in the top 20 in the Directors’ Cup,” said NACDA Executive Director Mike Cleary. “Standing in the Cup has become as competitive as advancing to the postseason. The Cup has become a much bigger phenomenon at the presidential level than we know. It has evolved into part of the school’s athletics mission statement. It has become part of what the AD wants to — and is expected to — accomplish.”

Not surprisingly, that worries some ADs. One of them, oddly enough, is Ted Leland, whose Stanford University program won 11 straight Division I titles under his watch. Leland, who left Stanford last year to become the vice president for advancement at his alma mater University of the Pacific, said he became so concerned about the Cup’s intensity that he tried talking Stanford people out of participating in it.

“But I got no support from Stanford student-athletes or advisory groups — they loved it because they were winning it,” Leland said.

Leland, who never had Cup clauses in his contracts, said that while beneficial in many respects, the ranking has artificially and unintentionally escalated pressure on coaches, administrators and student-athletes to perform. He cited one AD who said publicly that he fired a coach (among other reasons) because of that team’s lack of Cup standing.

“Having a set of numbers that causes people to evaluate themselves differently is inappropriate,” Leland said. “Everyone ought to be proud of their own programs. There’s no one best program. Every school is different, every team is different and every athlete is different. Life is too complicated to be reduced to a number or ranking.”

Having said that, though, Leland noted the Cup’s benefits probably balance the concerns. The all-sports ranking has motivated departments to support nonrevenue sports, he said, and has given athletes in those sports a sense of contributing to the greater good. The publicity generated for schools that are successful in the Cup also matters. “If only the Cup competition was light-hearted and fun and it motivated people to support broad-based programs, then great,” he said. “But when it becomes overly serious...”

Cleary knows other ADs worry out loud about their programs being evaluated based on the standings and said that “a lot of loyal NACDA members who if put in a voting booth would choose for the Cup to go away.”

But it won’t. NACDA was told in 2002 when Sears dropped its sponsorship and NACDA considered discontinuing the Cup that if it doesn’t administer the ranking, somebody else will. As much as some ADs don’t want the ranking, they want a non-NACDA ranking even less. “At least we have our own committee to provide input into the structure of the Cup, which is a benefit. That may not make some ADs like the Cup any better, but they all understand why we’re continuing to administer it,” Cleary said.

Making it fair

Former NACDA membership president Debbie Yow, the athletics director at the University of Maryland, College Park, said spending much time thinking about the Cup’s elimination is counterproductive. It does exist, she said, and it will continue to exist in some form.

“Generally, the concept of honoring and recognizing broad-based programs for competitive excellence is a good one,” Yow said. “How you go about measuring that fairly becomes an important question.”

That’s no easy task, given the increased pressure on the Cup as a success barometer. Most often at issue is the way the Cup is scored.

Over the years, NACDA has tweaked the scoring structure, notably in 1997 when the scoring committee changed the amount of points awarded for each placement and rationed point totals based on the size of the championship brackets. Some nonrevenue sports also were eliminated from the ranking in 2002 but then reinstated two years later.

But nothing caused a ruckus quite like last year when the scoring committee decided that for 2005-06, sports sponsored by 25 percent or less of the division membership would be awarded points at half value. The scoring change had been made a year earlier for sports with 10 percent sponsorship, but that didn’t affect Division I programs.

Raising the bar to 25 percent did. Suddenly, Division I field hockey, women’s lacrosse, men’s ice hockey and men’s lacrosse were in the reduction zone (with wrestling not far away), and representatives in those communities didn’t like it. They question such a decisive and significant drop in points at the 25 percent mark when there is no fluctuation for any other range. Under that scenario, they say, women’s rowing and Division I wrestling, sponsored by just over 25 percent of the membership, are worth 100 percent of the points while Division I women’s lacrosse and field hockey, which are in the 23-24 percent range, are worth only half.

Yow in fact said she was in the confounding position this fall of having to explain to her 2005 national champion field hockey student-athletes why they earned only half the Cup points their 2005 male soccer champion counterparts did.

“How do I begin to explain to the women why the men got double points, other than some people think that the soccer championship is more difficult to win because it has a larger bracket? That’s not a good reason,” she said.

NACDA committee members say the change was not arbitrary. In fact, current Chair Barbara Camp said the most recent change was made in reaction to constituents who claimed that treating sports with wide ranges in sponsorship the same wasn’t fair.

“Many people believe if there are 300 teams trying to win one sport and 40 trying to win another that it is not fair to reward the former the same as the latter,” said Camp, a senior associate athletics director and senior woman administrator at Auburn University. “We weren’t trying to devalue anything, but only look at what is fair.” 

Albany’s McElroy agreed. “It is more accurate to refer to this as an issue of proportionality,” he said. “For example, in basketball, if you’re getting 100 points based on a 64-team bracket, then smaller brackets should get a percentage of the 100 points.”

Yow said the idea of a gradated scale “is an interesting one and perhaps even correct.” But she said research must be conducted to determine at what sponsorship levels or bracket sizes championships become “easier” to win. “It doesn’t all stay equal until you get to 25 percent, then boom, it’s devalued by 50 percent. You just can’t do that to these kids.”

Cleary said the scoring committee talks about the scoring at each of its biannual meetings, regardless of whether there are proposals to change it. “The reason behind any change is to make the Cup more competitive. For every potential change, the subcommittee runs models — we take the last year of scoring and apply what the subcommittee is considering to see what the scoring would have been,” he said.

Cleary said subcommittee members looked at sponsorship across all three divisions and saw some “natural breaks” in the 25 percent range. Those breaks seemed consistent between men’s and women’s sports. “But it’s not until you put some of these models in place that you actually find some of the problems,” he said.

A matter of mission

It’s possible that further scoring changes will be implemented at NACDA’s annual convention in June. The current subcommittee already is studying alternative models along with revisiting another recent decision to rank only the top 100 programs (which also garnered a negative reaction). Yow and others met with the scoring committee in January to voice their concern and even suggest rescinding the current structure immediately, but committee members weren’t about to make a change in mid-year.

“They had a very good case, but we voted not to consider altering the scoring structure until the end of the ’05-06 year,” said McElroy. “Their concerns are valid, and we will look at those concerns. Unfortunately, there has been some misinformation being exchanged. Some people said the scoring changes were arbitrary. In my nine years of being affiliated with the Cup, there has always been a tremendous amount of input — a subcommittee has been formed to study the Cup with the goal of always making it as consistent and as fair as possible.”

Some people think the latest battle over how the Cup should be scored gnaws at the ranking’s core purpose.

“The premise in 1993 has not changed,” Cleary said. “It is to recognize the best all-around athletics program in the country. It honors the champion of champions.”

But what made the program unique at its inception — the fact that it counted all sports in which the NCAA sponsors championships — is what complicates it today. The Cup’s mission is to reward broad-based programming, but some say the recent scoring changes designed to treat some of the nonrevenue sports differently runs counter to that intent.

“More than 16,000 student-athletes were negatively affected by the most recent scoring change,” said Johns Hopkins University Athletics Director Tom Calder. “Winning a championship means just as much to those athletes as it does to athletes who play in sports sponsored by a larger number of schools.”

Mike Moyer, executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association, said changes to the Cup may even affect the very sponsorship of programs that it is designed to encourage. He said his organization has an interest in any incentive for broad-based programming, and the scoring change was “just another negative influence” on sports that already have a tough time with sponsorship numbers.

“It may not be clear how much the Cup factors into decisions about which sports to add or drop,” Moyer said, “but it is clear that the Cup has become the yardstick for measuring the success of an overall athletics program. It gets a lot of visibility, and those who do well in it don’t hesitate to promote that success. It’s fair to say that it does have enough of an impact that we should honor the spirit and intent of it.”

Others dispute the Cup’s influence on sport sponsorship. One NACDA member said that when ADs consider adding or deleting sports, they are going to look at the competition in the area and how much it will cost to travel as opposed to how many points they can get in the Cup. A school on the East Coast, for example, is more apt to add lacrosse than water polo.

Cleary said the scoring committee is going to make sure that “either the scoring method matches the mission or the mission matches the scoring.” He said the problem may be more in the nuances in the definition of broad-based programming rather than a misplaced mission. “We can score broad-based programs and count a large number of sports, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have to be scored at the same level,” he said. “In fact if you do that, many people would see that as being unfair. The Cup still counts every sport — to many that still means broad-based.”

“Schools have different philosophies,” Moyer noted. “Some want to put as much money into as few sports as possible; others want to provide as many opportunities across the board as they can. Therein lies the challenge for the Cup — it benefits some and works against others.”

McElroy agreed to an extent, though he noted that if schools choose to consolidate resources on just a few programs, those institutions probably won’t fare well in the Cup, regardless of how it is scored.

To a large degree, the fact that the Cup is so embattled verifies its importance to the athletics community — it’s worth fighting over. The trick for NACDA officials, though, is to make sure it’s a fair fight. The current subcommittee is reviewing alternative models that are — not surprisingly — more complicated, but NACDA officials believe that complexity is feasible as long as the program is transparent and the formulas are posted online.

“You try to find the fairest option for everyone,” Camp said. “We began long ago with the philosophy of treating every sport the same, and that’s still an option. But it’s very obvious that people don’t like what we’re doing this year.”

Despite the recent grumbling, Cleary said the Cup remains as a celebrated part of the intercollegiate athletics culture. “At the time the Cup was initiated there was no national ranking,” he said. “We stepped in and filled the void, and apparently we filled it very well. While there always will be work to do to make sure it is a fair measurement of overall success, NACDA is very pleased with the growth of the Cup and its value as a national program.”

Directors’ Cup chronology

1993-94

• Cup includes Division I only.
•  Ranking include 22 sports — 10 core sports and one wild-card sport for each gender; core sports based on participation percentage.
•  All NCAA championship sports, plus I-A football, are included, with the exception of the co-ed National Collegiate sports of fencing, rifle and skiing.
•  First place is worth 64 points, moving down one point for each place.

1995-96

• Divisions II and III and the NAIA added.
• Fencing, rifle and skiing added.
•  Divisions II and III use the same scoring structure, only changing the number of sports counted: Division II — 16 sports, six core and two wild-card sports for each gender; Division III — 20 sports, eight core and two wild-card sports each.

1997-98

• Number of sports reduced from 22 to 20 in Division I; from 16 to 14 in Division II.
• Sports no longer classified as core or wild-card.
• Winners of a national championship receive 100 points; points awarded based on bracket size, with definitions for 64-, 48-, 32-, 16-, 12-, eight-, four- and two-team brackets.

1999-2000

• Points increased for all places except first.
• Separate bracket structure implemented for individual sports; points based on actual placement.

2002-03

• NACDA begins discussion to discontinue the Directors’ Cup because of unintended results of the program.
• USA Today advises NACDA that it will continue ranking athletics programs if NACDA does not. Since NACDA would have no input in the scoring structure under that scenario, members decide to continue the program with several scoring changes.
• Minimum bracket sizes are established, and the following sports are eliminated: Division I — women’s ice hockey; Division II — field hockey, women’s lacrosse, women’s rowing, men’s lacrosse; Division III — women’s golf, women’s ice hockey, women’s rowing, men’s ice hockey; National Collegiate — rifle, women’s water polo, men’s water polo, men’s volleyball.
• Previously, points were awarded to the top 64 teams in each championship (65 in Division I men’s basketball). Now, five points are awarded to any team placing 65th or lower.

2004-05

• All sports eliminated from the scoring in 2002-03 are reinstated. However, sports with a participation percentage of 10 percent or less receive 50 percent of the points allocated for that bracket. Sports affected are: Division II — field hockey, women’s lacrosse, women’s rowing, men’s lacrosse; Division III — women’s ice hockey, women’s rowing, men’s ice hockey; National Collegiate — fencing, rifle, skiing, women’s bowling, women’s ice hockey, women’s water polo, men’s water polo, men’s gymnastics, men’s volleyball.
• Only the top 100 schools in each division are ranked.

2005-06

• Minimum participation percentage for sports to be scored at 50 percent of the points allocated for that bracket is changed from 10 percent to 25 percent. In addition to the 19 sports affected in 2004-05, the other sports affected are: Division I — field hockey, women’s lacrosse, men’s ice hockey, men’s lacrosse; Division II — women’s swimming, men’s swimming, wrestling; Division III — wrestling; and National Collegiate — women’s gymnastics.

 U.S. Sports Academy renews its Cup commitment for 2006-07

As difficult as it is to figure out a fair scoring mechanism for the Directors’ Cup, it doesn’t seem to be as hard to find a sponsor. The United States Sports Academy, only the Cup’s second title sponsor in the 13 years of the program, recently added a third year to its tenure when Chief Executive Officer Thomas Rosandich announced that the organization will sponsor the Cup again in 2006-07.

The Sports Academy is an independent, nonprofit, special-mission university of sport that provides programs of instruction, research and service. The academy’s Awards of Sport, which have been presented since the 1984 Olympics, include the Carl Maddox Sport Management Award, named after the former AD at Louisiana State University and Mississippi State University. The academy also selects an athlete and team of the year in addition to sponsoring the Directors’ Cup.

Sears Roebuck and Company sponsored the Directors’ Cup from its inception in 1993 to 2001. Sears’ commitment included a unique postgraduate scholarship program for members of institutions’ athletics support programs. That initiative was discontinued when Sears ended its sponsorship.

NACDA self-administered the Cup for one year before the Sports Academy came aboard.

Cup standings are updated three times during each sports season and published in USA Today, The NCAA News and other periodicals.