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Unifying divisions
NCAA’s 1973 reorganization produced unwritten rules for structural change
NCAA’s 1973 reorganization produced unwritten rules for structural change
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By Jack Copeland
The NCAA News
The NCAA News
Through the years, the NCAA membership has written and often rewritten rules governing all aspects of intercollegiate athletics — and recorded them in the NCAA Manual.
However, it may be a set of unwritten rules, forged from the creation of the NCAA’s three current membership divisions, that best regulate the organization’s capacity for reshaping itself to deal with expansion.
In fact, a two-year debate during the early 1970s that resulted in the creation of Divisions I, II and III essentially established rules of engagement. None of those rules was ever written into the Manual, but they have governed the occasional jostling that has occurred as member institutions have sought greater freedom to pursue their own interests, needs and philosophies.
The principles established then are becoming evident again today as the NCAA, responding once again to pressures resulting from continuing membership growth, begins to study the possibility of creating a fourth division.
The process that produced today’s three divisions was bumpy, but the membership learned it could effectively reshape itself by:
Fault lines
The 1970s dawned as one of the most contentious periods in the Association’s history. The NCAA’s membership — growing rapidly to include more than 600 institutions of widely varying missions and budgets — essentially operated during the first 60 years of the organization’s history under the same set of rules. But tensions grew as disagreements flourished over such issues as eligibility standards and permissible financial aid.
A specific argument over ways to reduce financial aid expenditures reflected broader tensions as smaller programs found it increasingly difficult to compete against the big athletics budgets of larger institutions. That dispute touched off the sequence of events that led to the restructuring of the Association in 1973.
Recommendations were floated in 1971 to award athletics aid only on the basis of financial need — or alternately to reduce limits on permissible grants-in-aid in football and other sports in the name of cost containment. Those proposals quickly put large and small programs squarely at odds with each other.
They also provoked high-profile football coaches like Darrell Royal of the University of Texas at Austin and Frank Broyles of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville — who also served as their institutions’ directors of athletics — to tell newspaper reporters that the time had come for major football programs to consider splitting from the NCAA.
“It may be that we should break completely from the NCAA and do our own thing — start an organization from scratch,” Royal told United Press International during the summer of 1971. “It is inevitable that the big schools make some kind of split if we’re to stay in business.”
The widely publicized remarks touched off a “hullabaloo,” as Ed Sherman of Muskingum College described it a few months later. He soon would become a key part of the debate.
The Council that summer asked David Swank, faculty athletics representative at the University of Oklahoma and an NCAA district vice president, to chair a special committee to study “legislative reorganization.” The purpose was to examine the possibility of permitting members to reorganize not only into separate competitive divisions (as already had occurred to a large degree with the establishment of a College Division for championships), but also under separate legislative bylaws.
Things moved quickly — in fact, too quickly for most of the membership. Delegates at the 1972 annual Convention defeated a proposal to schedule a special Convention in mid-1972 to consider reorganization. Opponents said they wanted to know more about how the membership might be divided before agreeing to vote on the matter.
However, the financial aid debate continued through that year, fueling restructuring talk along the way.
“It has become quite apparent that it is impossible to come up with any solution (for financial aid) that can govern 650 institutions,” Eddie Crowder, athletics director and football coach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told delegates to the 1972 Convention.
“It is my definite impression that the solution to a great extent is the division of the NCAA into legislative groups…. As soon as that is done, I think we can discuss the problems of the coaches associated with each of these groups, and I think we can make definite headway to what we have been trying to do today with delegates representing those whose budgets range from $20,000 up to several million dollars.”
Swank essentially agreed with Crowder during a separate discussion of the reorganization study.
“The (financial aid debate) has made us aware of the divisive interest that exists within our organization,” he said. “It is difficult with certain types of bylaws or regulations to apply the same rules to the University of California, Los Angeles, as you might apply to Union College in New York.
“Many of the general concepts and principles will apply equally to all, but when we get to some of the questions, our student bodies are different (and) our athletics programs are different, and it is difficult to mesh these two together. So we do have some need for reorganization, and I believe the time is ripe now.”
The NCAA’s smaller schools also discussed the growing likelihood of restructuring during that Convention. Muskingum’s Sherman, a member of the Swank committee, voiced the concerns that led to rejection a day later of the proposal to schedule a special Convention.
“Maybe we need (reorganization),” he said. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with studying it, but I’d like to do it in a sensible way, and I don’t think we ought to be pressured into anything just because there is some discussion by a group of football coaches.”
With the special Convention scrapped, Swank’s committee worked through the first half of 1972 to produce a restructuring proposal that the NCAA Council agreed to sponsor at the 1973 Convention.
The proposal called for the creation of two divisions. Members joining Division I would be required to sponsor at least eight sports in which the NCAA sponsored championships or wrote playing rules, and also would be required to fund a “major” program in at least two sports — including either football or basketball. Schools that did not qualify for or chose not to participate in Division I would be placed in Division II.
Restructuring wasn’t the only major topic on the Convention agenda. The financial aid proposals also were due for a vote, along with a proposal to replace the 1.6 eligibility rule (which required prospective student-athletes to demonstrate through academic records and test scores that they would achieve at least a 1.6 grade-point average in college) with a new rule requiring prospects only to graduate from high school with a 2.0 grade-point average.
Together, they formed the San Andreas Fault of NCAA issues — clearly uncovering many of the differences between bigger and smaller programs.
Down the middle
The importance of the proposals was reflected in record attendance at the Convention.
The 2.0 eligibility standard was approved and need-based aid was defeated, but delegates imposed grant-in-aid ceilings in all sports, including a limit of 30 new scholarships annually and 75 additional scholarships (for a total of 105) in football.
The restructuring proposal produced the biggest vote tally in Convention history, and the 442 voting delegates split right down the middle. Voters rejected the Swank committee’s two-division model by six votes.
Just as the financial aid debate had fueled the movement toward reorganization in 1971, the Convention’s rejection of restructuring generated new heat from Arkansas’ Broyles and Texas’ Royal. The coaches, who also were unhappy with the football scholarship restrictions, brooded over the Eastern College Athletic Conference’s role in defeating the proposal.
“When a group of 200 (Eastern) schools can vote together as a bloc,” Broyles told The Dallas Morning News, “it’s time to take a new look at the structure of the NCAA. I really think a danger exists. I would expect to look toward a new organization, whether it means splitting or withdrawal.”
The narrow vote, however, served to enforce what might be the most important of the unwritten rules for changing the NCAA’s membership structure — achieving consensus.
Immediately after the Convention, the Council decided to call a special Convention for August to deal solely with restructuring. It appointed Sherman to chair a new Special Committee on Restructuring that would provide a new organizational model for consideration.
The Council, and Sherman, understood the real message of the Convention vote: The ECAC opposed restructuring because the two-division model catered to the “major” programs’ problems without addressing smaller programs’ own concerns.
“We didn’t like the idea of being placed in a division without having the ability to decide if we wanted to be in that division or not,” Scotty Whitelaw, ECAC commissioner, explained later to The Washington Post.
During the eight months between the January rejection of the two-division model and the two-day special Convention — the first in the Association’s history — Sherman’s committee put together a package of 14 proposals to address the ECAC’s and other membership concerns.
Those concerns included ensuring that dividing the Association structurally would not divide the organization philosophically. Sherman’s committee recommended that all schools continue to vote together on constitutional issues and also recommended a process by which the two-thirds of the Association’s membership could override division-specific actions.
The package also called for restructuring the composition of the Council and other committees, and — in a major expansion from the existing University/College Divisions array of championships — promised to create at least 10 championships in each division.
The remaining unwritten rules of restructuring would be established by the committee’s recommendation that schools, after choosing which division they wished to join, should be given five years to meet that division’s membership requirements. Under the proposal, only the 118 schools sponsoring “major” football automatically would be placed in Division I.
“What we originally did was say everybody could decide what division they wanted to join,” Sherman recalled nearly two decades later in a 1992 interview in The NCAA News. “We kind of sat down and put them in the division we thought they should be in. They could appeal if they wanted to change. We decided to divide the schools into three divisions. The divisions were responsible for setting the parameters.”
NCAA leaders seemed calm during that time about the prospects for achieving the historic restructuring, even as newspaper columnists reprised the saber-rattling of Broyles and Royal through the weeks leading up to the special Convention.
“The reorganization into separate divisions almost certainly will be accomplished by August,” said Earl Ramer, the Association’s immediate past president from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In an interview with The Kansas City Star in April while attending the dedication of the new NCAA national office in Mission, Kansas, he said, “As an association of individual institutions, we have the right to exist only as long as we meet the needs of different institutions.”
NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers told a Dallas Morning News columnist, “I don’t think there is any question” that member schools would choose restructuring over withdrawal from the Association.
“I believe that throughout the membership, there is a deep-seated feeling that the NCAA is an organization of real value,” he explained.
The ECAC’s Whitelaw, a leader of the forces that derailed the first attempt to reorganize, also offered assurances of success just a week before the special Convention.
“This new way allows every school to examine its own athletics programs and decide in just what division it would feel most comfortable,” he told The Washington Post. “Before, it seemed the proposal was weighted too heavily toward the major schools. Everything was spelled out for them and little was said about the second division for smaller schools.”
The basic proposal enabling creation of the three divisions passed by a 366-13 vote, and other elements of the package were adopted with voice votes or by showing voting paddles.
A few months later, after the NCAA conducted a Convention for the first time as a three-division body, The NCAA News editorialized that the new structure was working as envisioned.
“The Convention proved that the nation’s colleges and universities are concerned with the betterment of intercollegiate athletics on all levels, from the massive state universities to the small liberal arts institutions, and can and will work together to achieve their goals.”
Since then, the NCAA membership has persevered through several bumpy episodes. Division I was subdivided and reorganized during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1990s, the membership further federated its structure and placed unprecedented divisional autonomy in the hands of institutional presidents.
Those unwritten rules established during the early 1970s — consensus, self-selection and opportunity to adjust — have been applied in one form or another during subsequent efforts to reshape the face of the Association. They’ve helped preserve the membership’s “deep-seated feeling” that differing missions and philosophies effectively can be accommodated within a diverse but united Association.
Those rules may be tested again during coming months.
David Swank, faculty athletics representative
University of Oklahoma
“We also have to think when we vote on any reorganization: What will this do to the NCAA? Before we should ever vote for any reorganization, we should consider that fully, because I believe that the National Collegiate Athletic Association should continue. It should not be divided in such a way that it might come apart. We have to continue to have an association that represents the diverse interests of all of us, and in the reorganization we have to figure out a way of doing this without destroying the whole.”
Paul “Bear” Bryant, head football coach
University of Alabama
“I’m not of the opinion yet that we ought to jump the traces. We should have a new division of the NCAA or a new conference, but I don’t mean pull out of anything.”
Wilbur “Sparky” Stalcup,
director of athletics
University of Missouri, Columbia
“We’re in sympathy with (Coach Darrell) Royal, but we’re not in sympathy to the point we’re going to pull out of anything.”
J. Neils Thompson,
faculty athletics representative
University of Texas at Austin
“The maintenance of a strong and effective NCAA is most important, and it is more important today than at any time in the past history of the NCAA. Our institutions can maintain control of intercollegiate athletics only if we can organize the NCAA into an effective body to serve the broad spectrum of programs we now have in our institution.”
However, it may be a set of unwritten rules, forged from the creation of the NCAA’s three current membership divisions, that best regulate the organization’s capacity for reshaping itself to deal with expansion.
In fact, a two-year debate during the early 1970s that resulted in the creation of Divisions I, II and III essentially established rules of engagement. None of those rules was ever written into the Manual, but they have governed the occasional jostling that has occurred as member institutions have sought greater freedom to pursue their own interests, needs and philosophies.
The principles established then are becoming evident again today as the NCAA, responding once again to pressures resulting from continuing membership growth, begins to study the possibility of creating a fourth division.
The process that produced today’s three divisions was bumpy, but the membership learned it could effectively reshape itself by:
- Achieving consensus on the purposes of restructuring.
- Permitting self-selection of membership classification.
- Giving schools time to adjust to change.
Fault lines
The 1970s dawned as one of the most contentious periods in the Association’s history. The NCAA’s membership — growing rapidly to include more than 600 institutions of widely varying missions and budgets — essentially operated during the first 60 years of the organization’s history under the same set of rules. But tensions grew as disagreements flourished over such issues as eligibility standards and permissible financial aid.
A specific argument over ways to reduce financial aid expenditures reflected broader tensions as smaller programs found it increasingly difficult to compete against the big athletics budgets of larger institutions. That dispute touched off the sequence of events that led to the restructuring of the Association in 1973.
Recommendations were floated in 1971 to award athletics aid only on the basis of financial need — or alternately to reduce limits on permissible grants-in-aid in football and other sports in the name of cost containment. Those proposals quickly put large and small programs squarely at odds with each other.
They also provoked high-profile football coaches like Darrell Royal of the University of Texas at Austin and Frank Broyles of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville — who also served as their institutions’ directors of athletics — to tell newspaper reporters that the time had come for major football programs to consider splitting from the NCAA.
“It may be that we should break completely from the NCAA and do our own thing — start an organization from scratch,” Royal told United Press International during the summer of 1971. “It is inevitable that the big schools make some kind of split if we’re to stay in business.”
The widely publicized remarks touched off a “hullabaloo,” as Ed Sherman of Muskingum College described it a few months later. He soon would become a key part of the debate.
The Council that summer asked David Swank, faculty athletics representative at the University of Oklahoma and an NCAA district vice president, to chair a special committee to study “legislative reorganization.” The purpose was to examine the possibility of permitting members to reorganize not only into separate competitive divisions (as already had occurred to a large degree with the establishment of a College Division for championships), but also under separate legislative bylaws.Things moved quickly — in fact, too quickly for most of the membership. Delegates at the 1972 annual Convention defeated a proposal to schedule a special Convention in mid-1972 to consider reorganization. Opponents said they wanted to know more about how the membership might be divided before agreeing to vote on the matter.
However, the financial aid debate continued through that year, fueling restructuring talk along the way.
“It has become quite apparent that it is impossible to come up with any solution (for financial aid) that can govern 650 institutions,” Eddie Crowder, athletics director and football coach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told delegates to the 1972 Convention.
“It is my definite impression that the solution to a great extent is the division of the NCAA into legislative groups…. As soon as that is done, I think we can discuss the problems of the coaches associated with each of these groups, and I think we can make definite headway to what we have been trying to do today with delegates representing those whose budgets range from $20,000 up to several million dollars.”
Swank essentially agreed with Crowder during a separate discussion of the reorganization study.
“The (financial aid debate) has made us aware of the divisive interest that exists within our organization,” he said. “It is difficult with certain types of bylaws or regulations to apply the same rules to the University of California, Los Angeles, as you might apply to Union College in New York.
“Many of the general concepts and principles will apply equally to all, but when we get to some of the questions, our student bodies are different (and) our athletics programs are different, and it is difficult to mesh these two together. So we do have some need for reorganization, and I believe the time is ripe now.”
The NCAA’s smaller schools also discussed the growing likelihood of restructuring during that Convention. Muskingum’s Sherman, a member of the Swank committee, voiced the concerns that led to rejection a day later of the proposal to schedule a special Convention.
“Maybe we need (reorganization),” he said. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with studying it, but I’d like to do it in a sensible way, and I don’t think we ought to be pressured into anything just because there is some discussion by a group of football coaches.”
With the special Convention scrapped, Swank’s committee worked through the first half of 1972 to produce a restructuring proposal that the NCAA Council agreed to sponsor at the 1973 Convention.
The proposal called for the creation of two divisions. Members joining Division I would be required to sponsor at least eight sports in which the NCAA sponsored championships or wrote playing rules, and also would be required to fund a “major” program in at least two sports — including either football or basketball. Schools that did not qualify for or chose not to participate in Division I would be placed in Division II.
Restructuring wasn’t the only major topic on the Convention agenda. The financial aid proposals also were due for a vote, along with a proposal to replace the 1.6 eligibility rule (which required prospective student-athletes to demonstrate through academic records and test scores that they would achieve at least a 1.6 grade-point average in college) with a new rule requiring prospects only to graduate from high school with a 2.0 grade-point average.
Together, they formed the San Andreas Fault of NCAA issues — clearly uncovering many of the differences between bigger and smaller programs.
Down the middle
The importance of the proposals was reflected in record attendance at the Convention.
The 2.0 eligibility standard was approved and need-based aid was defeated, but delegates imposed grant-in-aid ceilings in all sports, including a limit of 30 new scholarships annually and 75 additional scholarships (for a total of 105) in football.
The restructuring proposal produced the biggest vote tally in Convention history, and the 442 voting delegates split right down the middle. Voters rejected the Swank committee’s two-division model by six votes.
Just as the financial aid debate had fueled the movement toward reorganization in 1971, the Convention’s rejection of restructuring generated new heat from Arkansas’ Broyles and Texas’ Royal. The coaches, who also were unhappy with the football scholarship restrictions, brooded over the Eastern College Athletic Conference’s role in defeating the proposal.
“When a group of 200 (Eastern) schools can vote together as a bloc,” Broyles told The Dallas Morning News, “it’s time to take a new look at the structure of the NCAA. I really think a danger exists. I would expect to look toward a new organization, whether it means splitting or withdrawal.”
The narrow vote, however, served to enforce what might be the most important of the unwritten rules for changing the NCAA’s membership structure — achieving consensus.
Immediately after the Convention, the Council decided to call a special Convention for August to deal solely with restructuring. It appointed Sherman to chair a new Special Committee on Restructuring that would provide a new organizational model for consideration.
The Council, and Sherman, understood the real message of the Convention vote: The ECAC opposed restructuring because the two-division model catered to the “major” programs’ problems without addressing smaller programs’ own concerns.
“We didn’t like the idea of being placed in a division without having the ability to decide if we wanted to be in that division or not,” Scotty Whitelaw, ECAC commissioner, explained later to The Washington Post.
During the eight months between the January rejection of the two-division model and the two-day special Convention — the first in the Association’s history — Sherman’s committee put together a package of 14 proposals to address the ECAC’s and other membership concerns.
Those concerns included ensuring that dividing the Association structurally would not divide the organization philosophically. Sherman’s committee recommended that all schools continue to vote together on constitutional issues and also recommended a process by which the two-thirds of the Association’s membership could override division-specific actions.
The package also called for restructuring the composition of the Council and other committees, and — in a major expansion from the existing University/College Divisions array of championships — promised to create at least 10 championships in each division.
The remaining unwritten rules of restructuring would be established by the committee’s recommendation that schools, after choosing which division they wished to join, should be given five years to meet that division’s membership requirements. Under the proposal, only the 118 schools sponsoring “major” football automatically would be placed in Division I.
“What we originally did was say everybody could decide what division they wanted to join,” Sherman recalled nearly two decades later in a 1992 interview in The NCAA News. “We kind of sat down and put them in the division we thought they should be in. They could appeal if they wanted to change. We decided to divide the schools into three divisions. The divisions were responsible for setting the parameters.”
NCAA leaders seemed calm during that time about the prospects for achieving the historic restructuring, even as newspaper columnists reprised the saber-rattling of Broyles and Royal through the weeks leading up to the special Convention.
“The reorganization into separate divisions almost certainly will be accomplished by August,” said Earl Ramer, the Association’s immediate past president from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In an interview with The Kansas City Star in April while attending the dedication of the new NCAA national office in Mission, Kansas, he said, “As an association of individual institutions, we have the right to exist only as long as we meet the needs of different institutions.”
NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers told a Dallas Morning News columnist, “I don’t think there is any question” that member schools would choose restructuring over withdrawal from the Association.
“I believe that throughout the membership, there is a deep-seated feeling that the NCAA is an organization of real value,” he explained.
The ECAC’s Whitelaw, a leader of the forces that derailed the first attempt to reorganize, also offered assurances of success just a week before the special Convention.
“This new way allows every school to examine its own athletics programs and decide in just what division it would feel most comfortable,” he told The Washington Post. “Before, it seemed the proposal was weighted too heavily toward the major schools. Everything was spelled out for them and little was said about the second division for smaller schools.”
The basic proposal enabling creation of the three divisions passed by a 366-13 vote, and other elements of the package were adopted with voice votes or by showing voting paddles.
A few months later, after the NCAA conducted a Convention for the first time as a three-division body, The NCAA News editorialized that the new structure was working as envisioned.
“The Convention proved that the nation’s colleges and universities are concerned with the betterment of intercollegiate athletics on all levels, from the massive state universities to the small liberal arts institutions, and can and will work together to achieve their goals.”
Since then, the NCAA membership has persevered through several bumpy episodes. Division I was subdivided and reorganized during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1990s, the membership further federated its structure and placed unprecedented divisional autonomy in the hands of institutional presidents.
Those unwritten rules established during the early 1970s — consensus, self-selection and opportunity to adjust — have been applied in one form or another during subsequent efforts to reshape the face of the Association. They’ve helped preserve the membership’s “deep-seated feeling” that differing missions and philosophies effectively can be accommodated within a diverse but united Association.
Those rules may be tested again during coming months.
Other voices
In addition to such integral figures in the early-1970s restructuring debate as Darrell Royal, Eddie Crowder, Ed Sherman and Scotty Whitelaw, others spoke up to urge achieving restructuring while maintaing a unified Association:
David Swank, faculty athletics representative
University of Oklahoma
“We also have to think when we vote on any reorganization: What will this do to the NCAA? Before we should ever vote for any reorganization, we should consider that fully, because I believe that the National Collegiate Athletic Association should continue. It should not be divided in such a way that it might come apart. We have to continue to have an association that represents the diverse interests of all of us, and in the reorganization we have to figure out a way of doing this without destroying the whole.”
Paul “Bear” Bryant, head football coach
University of Alabama
“I’m not of the opinion yet that we ought to jump the traces. We should have a new division of the NCAA or a new conference, but I don’t mean pull out of anything.”
Wilbur “Sparky” Stalcup,
director of athletics
University of Missouri, Columbia
“We’re in sympathy with (Coach Darrell) Royal, but we’re not in sympathy to the point we’re going to pull out of anything.”
J. Neils Thompson,
faculty athletics representative
University of Texas at Austin
“The maintenance of a strong and effective NCAA is most important, and it is more important today than at any time in the past history of the NCAA. Our institutions can maintain control of intercollegiate athletics only if we can organize the NCAA into an effective body to serve the broad spectrum of programs we now have in our institution.”
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