It may be the most succinct question ever asked within the Association: Are three divisions enough?
That, essentially, is the query the NCAA will begin wrestling with in earnest at the 2008 Convention. It will be at least a year before anyone is asked to respond with a vote, but the possibility that the Association will receive its first major makeover in 35 years appears set to move to the top of the agenda as the entire membership begins participating in the search for an answer.

The reasons for asking the question are becoming clear. Despite a series of moratoriums in all three divisions to occasionally halt the influx of new members, the Association continues to grow. There were 665 schools in the NCAA when it split into its current three-division structure in 1973. That total has increased 55 percent to the current 1,033 members.

In just 10 years since the NCAA reorganized its governance structure to give divisions more autonomy — a period during which moratoriums totaling four years were implemented in each division to halt growth — membership still has increased by about 15 percent.

Despite Division I’s recent implementation of yet another moratorium — extending four years through 2011, but primarily affecting institutions that already are NCAA members and attempting to increase their financial commitment to intercollegiate athletics — Association-wide growth will continue. About three dozen institutions already are halfway through the door, having been granted provisional-membership status, and another 10 institutions officially are “exploring” membership.

Indications are that more new members are on the way. Even after recently adopting tougher membership standards and reducing the number of schools it will accept annually for membership, Division III alone forecasts growth from its current total of 422 members to about 465 schools 10 years from now — a 10 percent increase.

Of course, pure numbers alone do not dictate action, even though growing membership impacts such things as access to championships and the ways in which schools benefit from the Association’s budget and services.

What has dictated action through the history of the Association is a widening diversity in institutions’ reasons for and objectives in sponsoring intercollegiate athletics programs. Put simply, any time a membership classification has grown so large that one sizable segment of that group felt pressure to protect its stake in intercollegiate sports, that division typically has considered — and occasionally agreed upon — a split into smaller and more cohesive units.

Recently, a Division III working group studying membership issues agreed that such a time again may be at hand. Its conclusions recently were mailed to the Division III membership, and will be the focus of several discussion sessions at next month’s Convention. Those discussions will kick off formal consideration not only by Division III, but the entire Association, whether the NCAA again is ripe for restructuring.

‘Confluence of events’

“In the past three to four years, there have been a number of issues — what I would term a confluence of events — that really have fostered what has become an Association-wide discussion,” said Bernard Franklin, NCAA senior vice president for governance, membership services, education services and research.

Those issues have ranged from matters of nomenclature — a struggle over how best to distinguish the Division I institutions that play in football conferences that compete for berths in bowl games from those that seek to qualify for NCAA-sponsored championship play — to efforts to shrink existing competitive gaps between groups of schools, as occurred in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the number of Division II football scholarship from 36 to 28.

The outcome of those discussions (including the renaming of Divisions I-A and I-AA, now known as the Football Bowl and Football Championship Subdivisions) seems at least to have helped keep at bay growth’s constant challenges to the cohesiveness of those divisional groupings. In Division II’s case, the scholarship debate actually may have created greater cohesion by prompting the division to re-evaluate and more clearly state its purpose within the Association’s membership structure.

However, growth also has been at work in Division III. First, it prompted legislative initiatives at recent Conventions that served as that division’s own attempt to more clearly define its mission within the Association. Substantial majorities within the division supported many of the proposals, such as a ban on redshirting, but other proposals — notably several related to playing seasons — were decided by close votes. Perhaps more telling, disagreements lingered over those issues, and as a result, awareness grew that continuing growth soon might alter a hard-won consensus on key issues.

Then, the pressure reached a point two years ago where a member conference’s attempt to impose a cap on growth touched off debate not just within the division, but across the Association.
“This whole discussion really dates to the North Coast Athletic Conference’s proposal to cap membership — they wanted a way to address membership growth in Division III,” Franklin said. “But representatives from Division II said one division can’t arbitrarily vote to cap its own membership because of the ramifications for the other divisions. And thus, that was the creation — kind of a birthing process — for this Association-wide discussion.”

In a way, the current discussion is an echo of the Association’s first restructuring that began in the late 1950s and concluded with a formal reorganization into University and College Divisions in 1967. That, too, was a process that began with the organization’s “smaller” athletics programs.
The NCAA was founded in 1906 with 28 member schools. Fifty years later and 10 times larger, the Association initiated a split into two divisions as smaller schools — the source of membership growth through most of the organization’s history — found themselves cut off from access to championships participation.

That action helped spark forces that still reverberate today. More than one-third of Division III’s current membership joined the NCAA during a period from 1950 (when about 75 current Division III members belonged) until 1973 (by which time about 150 more current members had joined). That influx was a major force behind the Association’s restructuring into three divisions — the first of a series of accommodations (also including the subdivision of Division I in 1977 and governance reorganization in 1996) for larger programs seeking more autonomy over their own affairs.

After the 1973 restructuring, the influx maintained pace — almost half (about 200 schools) of the current Division III membership has joined since the division was formed. Similar growth occurred in Division II — more than half of its current members have joined since restructuring — and it also generally has maintained that rate despite significant reclassification of institutions into Division I during that period.

Today, Division III is the Association’s largest division. More than 40 percent of the NCAA membership has chosen to compete in the only division in the Association that prohibits the granting of athletics-based financial aid.

Division I also currently is experiencing a growth spurt, as about 20 Division II institutions formally have begun the reclassification process and are stepping up spending on intercollegiate athletics — thus committing to support college sports at a level that the Presidential Task Force on the Future of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics recently suggested may not be sustainable even by many current Division I members. The spurt in a trend that overall has seen 47 Division II schools reclassify into Division I since 1986 — and related concerns about the readiness of incoming schools for division membership — recently was a factor in the Division I Board of Directors’ decision to implement the current four-year moratorium for the purpose of re-evaluating membership criteria.
“The situation we currently have is three divisions at different places, going down a path to talk about membership,” said Daniel Curran, president of the University of Dayton and chair of an Association-wide working group that the NCAA Executive Committee formed initially in response to the North Coast Athletic Conference’s proposed cap on Division III membership.

Division or subdivision?

The events of the past few years have put the panel charged with overseeing Association-wide issues squarely at the intersection of the three divisions’ membership concerns — and seeking an outcome that serves all.

“The key for the Executive Committee is to pull all this together and be aware of the overall impact on the Association,” Curran said. “Certainly, we want to meet members’ needs, because we are a membership-driven organization. The working group will be the hub to pull all this information together.”

At the invitation of the Executive Committee, Division III is sparking the next phase in discussions about ways to manage future membership growth and diversity of programs. This time, it isn’t a proposal to cap the membership that’s creating all the talk, but a recommendation by the working group that the NCAA either create a new division or subdivide Division III.

Though it took no position on the recommendation, the Executive Committee working group forwarded the Division III group’s proposals — and that group’s preference for creating a new division — for discussion in Association-wide and Division III forums at the 2008 Convention.
“I think the research (the Division III working group) conducted, which will be presented at the annual meeting, fully articulates the strengths and weaknesses of those models — the subdivision model and the new division,” Curran said. “A coherent, clear presentation of the options and the challenges facilitates the whole membership seeing what is going on here — and I emphasize the whole membership, because the option to (create) another division has ramifications for the whole Association.”

John Fry, chair of the Division III Presidents Council and a Division III working group member, says that regardless of whether the membership ultimately prefers a new division or subdivision, the resulting new grouping should be clearly distinguishable from the current divisions.
“What we’ve come up with is the notion that there needs to be a distinct philosophical viewpoint for a new division,” he said. “We want to emphasize a broader base of athletics offerings from what the current Division III offers. Therefore, the philosophy can over time become distinct from Division III — not better, just different.”

The working group, after analyzing data that isolated one clearly identifiable difference between segments of the current Division III membership, recommended that schools choosing to join a new grouping should sponsor more sports than currently required in Division III. It suggested 16 sports as the minimum.

It also suggested several legislative areas (see descriptions of proposed models on page A3) in which the new group should seek to distinguish itself, though it also recommended that the group retain Division III’s prohibition against awarding athletics aid — a step it believes ultimately increases future options for new NCAA members that prefer to conduct nonscholarship programs.
Fry said the working group’s proposed models generally feature three components.

“First, student-athletes would be strongly encouraged to pursue broad-based educational experiences. By that, we want them to be full members of the academic community — not only through educational activities but also in co-curricular and extracurricular activities. We’ve talked about playing two sports, or playing one sport and also having an opportunity in another semester to be part of a theater group or a music group or some other group that might be distinctly different…we’re looking for full integration in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, with the educational experience being central.

“The second piece is to be assertive about holding institutions accountable to this philosophy through a series of reporting and review processes. Without being onerous, we want people to bear down on whether they are living this new division’s philosophy,” he said, adding that the new group would retain a financial aid reporting process while also tracking such trends as academic performance, diversity and equity.

“The next thing, and to some degree the most important practical consideration, would be the role of presidents. We’re emphasizing that. If your institution wants to be part of this new division, we would absolutely insist on greater presidential authority and responsibility for athletics, to ensure that athletics and academics are fully integrated.”

Presidential involvement

It certainly appears presidents are beginning to take interest in the developing discussion. More than 100 leaders of Division III institutions have registered to attend the upcoming Convention, approaching the record number that participated in the 2004 meeting that adopted the first phase of “Future of Division III” legislative initiatives.

Franklin, himself a former institutional president at a Division II institution, believes presidents will play a key role in the approaching discussions about the best direction to proceed — a role he thinks by necessity must be “collaborative in style and facilitating in nature.”

“You can’t take on this kind of reshaping of the landscape and think that you can do it in isolation, with presidential leadership alone,” he said. “You’ve got to have conference commissioners involved in this kind of discussion, you’ve got to have athletics directors involved, you’ve got to have student-athletes involved — you’ve got to have all the important constituencies involved in the dialogue, and you’ve got to seek their input.”

But Fry believes presidents’ participation can help move discussions beyond skepticism he has encountered about the need for some kind of action in response to continuing growth — or suspicions that one group of schools is trying to set itself up as “better” than another.
“If you approach this from the standpoint of institutional mission, you have a couple of different ways to go,” he suggested. “Some institutions, because of their history or culture, would rather focus resources on a smaller number of sports, and put more effort into them — which by necessity involves fewer students. However, it gives those schools a point of differentiation…being more competitive in fewer sports would make sense institutionally, and if I was president of an institution like that, I probably would take that approach — there’s nothing wrong with that approach.
“That’s a perfectly legitimate way to think about athletics. You may decide you want to be less encumbered by policies or procedures or restrictions in trying to recruit the best people, because you want more flexibility.

“Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘We’re really about having a large number of our students participate…we think the athletics experience is essential to their undergraduate experience as a whole, whether it be intercollegiate athletics or intramurals or club sports or rec sports.’

“I believe there are at least two different ways of going — both of which, if you follow them, are by necessity going to have different governance and legislative principles attached to them,” Fry continued. “And I think both are fine.”

Whatever the outcome, Curran agreed that it’s time for the entire Association to consider the questions raised in Division III — if for no other reason than to demonstrate its readiness to accommodate as fully as possible its membership’s varying purposes and needs.

“If we do nothing, we’re ignoring a significant number of our members who have expressed a concern — they want to approach college athletics in a different way,” Curran said. “Their concern is legitimate, and we have to address it as an organization.

“Now, that could be through a subdivision or that could be through a new division — that remains to be decided. As a membership organization, if there is a group of institutions saying they really feel differently about this — this does not meet their needs — we must pay attention to this. It would not be in the best interests of the NCAA to ignore this. A decision has to be made.”