Former University of Nevada, Reno, President Joseph N. Crowley was worried when he first saw Division I’s proposal to restructure the NCAA.

“My biggest concern was whether in the course of putting this structure together we could preserve the Association,” said the man who was the Association’s membership president when restructuring was being formulated. “In the first rendition of the proposal, both the commissioners’ paper and then the first offering by Division I, the sense of ‘Association’ was going to disappear.”

In Crowley’s new book about the NCAA Centennial, “In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century,” he points out that the equity conferences in Division I were intent on taking full control over the enterprise through restructuring. “The commissioners made a case for equity,” Crowley wrote, “but their theme was neither gender nor ethnicity. The subject was money, and the authority they thought should go with it.”

Crowley said the early iterations of the proposal addressed Division I only; in the first versions, its presidents would not only be in charge of Division I, but also of the entire organization. “The Council, the Presidents Commission and at least in its present form, the Convention, would become artifacts of history,” Crowley wrote. Divisions II and III would continue as NCAA members, but with a subservient role in overall Association decision-making. Also, the Executive Committee could call for a membership vote on a division action it found troubling, but it had no other powers.

With the Division I proposal the lone plan on the table in 1994, the NCAA Joint Policy Board, supported by the Council and the Presidents Commission, called for other ideas and appointed then-Syracuse University Chancellor Kenneth “Buzz” Shaw to co-chair a Division I task force to work out the details.

Crowley, who himself chaired the Association-wide oversight committee that actually implemented restructuring, said the compromises Shaw’s task force was able to broker in Division I — the financial guarantees and access to governance — salvaged what could have been a total loss of the NCAA’s sense of association.

“We got through it, and I thought we came out the other side as well as we probably could,” he said. “I think Divisions II and III were reasonably happy — they got constitutional guarantees of financial commitments — and we made something out of the Executive Committee, which in the first offering was hard to tell why we needed it at all.”

If any sense of association was lost, it might have been most pronounced at the Convention. Previously, the annual rule-making gathering also gave delegates an opportunity to gather socially and exchange ideas and information. After the 1997 Convention, though — the last under the old model — Division I attendance dropped by about 10 percent, since the January meeting no longer was pivotal to the division’s legislative process.

Total attendance at the 1997 Convention was 2,685. By 2003, it sank to 1,603, as many Division I non-voting members who used to attend stopped coming, since there was little business to oversee.

But the Convention itself was part of the reason Division I-A wanted to federate. According to former Southeastern Conference Commissioner Roy Kramer, legislating via the Convention was too slow.

“There was a desire for a faster process,” he said. “Before, if you did something at the Convention and it didn’t work out the way you wanted, it could take a year or two to get it back on the Convention floor.”

Crowley, too, heard the complaints that the way the Association did its business was “dreadful,” because it was a town meeting. “However noisy and seemingly unproductive it might have been, though, it was democracy in action, a legislating Convention,” Crowley said. “And I never minded all of that — people going on too long, or the arguments or what have you. That’s what we are in this country, at least when we have an opportunity to do our business that way, a town-meeting sort of business. It’s really something to value, and so I was a little upset by the thought of losing that.”

Kramer believes what upset people most, at least in Division I, was a perceived loss of voting privileges. According to Kramer, though, the vote still exists — it’s just not as personal as it was.

“There are those who feel that when there was a Convention they could hold up their paddle. They always had a voice at the Convention,” Kramer said. “Well, they have that voice now through their conference representatives but they have to work at it more and be more involved in the process.

“You didn’t have to work too hard with the old Convention — at least half of the delegates came to the Convention after having read the proposals for the first time the night before. They weren’t really well informed, and we had some unusual outcomes in voting. We had a less-informed membership in the old process.”

Kramer said restructured governance actually involves the Division I membership more than the Convention did. The representative format elevates the role of the conference and demands legislative discussions in smaller forums in which people truly deliberate the issues, he said.

“It’s difficult to really discuss an issue on the floor of the Convention,” Kramer said. “You get two or three loud speeches and all of the sudden people are voting for legislation they’re unsure about. The idea of restructuring was to strengthen the involvement at the local level so people would be better informed about the legislation, and through their representative would have more control over the legislation.”

Crowley, though, said, “I do think we’ve lost something with restructuring. If you build a representative system, then the vehicles for representation inevitably are going to take the place of the Association’s direct relationship to its institutional members, and clearly that happened,” he said.

Kramer said the overwhelming benefit, however, is that restructuring put presidents in their proper place — at the top. He said the creation of the Division I Board and the Divisions II and III Presidents Councils gives presidents and chancellors the ultimate say-so.

“And they haven’t abused that authority, either,” he said. “When they’ve overridden something from the Management Council they’ve typically just sent it back for additional study, which ultimately has led to better ideas most of the time. It hasn’t been an adversarial relationship. That didn’t exist at the old Convention. You either voted yes or no. You couldn’t revise it like you can now.”

Shaw acknowledged what he called “the unfortunate side effect” of the Convention no longer being well attended by Division I presidents and ADs. But restructuring, he said, helped the NCAA focus on the real issues confronting each of the divisions and to be able to resolve them.

“It begs the question of what you want to accomplish with your governance,” Shaw said. “What you want are decisions that are well thought through by representatives who are accepting accountability for those decisions, as opposed to the kind of voting that used to occur at the Convention.

“The loss is that a lot of people don’t go to the Convention now because they feel they don’t have to. But to me the decision-making is a lot cleaner. Now, are the decisions better? History will judge that. But the system is more efficient, and decisions can be made more easily.”

—    Gary T. Brown