A survey of presidential views on the sustainability of intercollegiate athletics released Monday revealed that most presidents feel powerless to curb out-of-control costs.

In brief phone interviews, most presidents told the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics that sweeping change is necessary but few offered solutions. The survey included 95 presidents at Football Bowl Subdivision institutions and lengthier follow-up queries with 22 of those.

The Knight Commission, which celebrated its 20th anniversary at its meeting in Miami, said its own ideas to address spiraling athletics spending are forthcoming in a comprehensive report to be issued in spring 2010. While commission co-chairs Brit Kirwan and Gerald Turner did not hint at what those proposals might be, both emphasized that fiscal reform would have to follow a similar path to that of academic reform.

They said the academic reforms the NCAA developed and adopted over the last decade started with data to inform decisions and drive a collective sense for action. They also said the process provided the kind of transparency that would apply public and peer pressure on institutions to hold themselves accountable for improving the academic performance of their student-athletes. The Academic Progress Rate has been successful in that regard.

“We are in a parallel phase with fiscal reform,” said Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. “If you think back to (when there was building momentum for academic reform), no one would have conceived that we would have gotten to where we are now with the APR.

“We are going to have an important report that will start a process that I hope over the ensuing years will lead to a significant alteration in the fiscal model for intercollegiate athletics.”

The survey conducted for the commission by the Art and Science Group made it clear that presidents preferred a collective approach rather than instigating change on their own. Respondents repeatedly said they felt powerless to create change even on their own campuses when it comes to athletics financing, much less the Football Bowl Subdivision as a whole, even though the NCAA has structured its governance to give presidents decision-making authority. They cited competitive concerns as a primary barrier to taking steps on their own, as well as a lack of confidence that more prosperous athletics programs in their own conferences would even want to change.

The survey also revealed a number of other paradoxes:

• Most presidents regard escalating coaches’ salaries as the greatest impediment to sustainability, yet few leaders would support an attempt to change federal legislation to allow for these salaries to be controlled.
• Presidents cited an “insidious and growing cultural divide between academics and athletics in which athletics is in an increasingly privileged position,” yet they also made it clear that being able to compete at the FBS level carries considerable financial and other less tangible benefits to the institution.
• While existing research refutes that spending on big-time athletics generates a reciprocal big-time return, presidents say that from their own personal experience, athletics success increases the quality of applications to the university and the number of donations from boosters.
• Despite understanding the value of broad-based athletics offerings, almost 80 percent of respondents from so-called “non-equity conferences” and even 45 percent from equity conferences might favor reducing the level of financial commitment to be a member of the FBS (perhaps by reducing the required number of sports sponsored).

Also, despite concern over the fiscal pressures on athletics, the survey said “the most common sentiment expressed by presidents regarding current levels of spending was their desire to increase revenue rather than opt out of the system or push for systemic change.”

When asked about that finding, Kirwan and Turner said it was likely grounded in presidents “wishing” for revenue to make problems go away, but knowing that to be an unrealistic outcome.

“If you gave any president those three alternatives,” said Turner, the president at Southern Methodist University, “the least painful and the one in which you are the hero immediately is for you to raise huge amounts of money that keeps all of this lubricated and doesn’t require you to make painful cuts or painful decisions. Given the options, that response is predictable.

“It’s the same way with academic programs. I’d much prefer to have my endowment get back to what it was rather than have to make the cuts we are going to have to make to deal with the lost distribution. I don’t see that as being in conflict, but rather wishful thinking and how it would be the easiest to resolve. But there’s a clear realism in that we know that isn’t going to happen, and we just want some help and a consensus among our colleagues to go down that trail.”

Kirwan agreed that the economic realities all universities are facing trumped such wishful thinking that increased revenues could bail them out of a fiscal jam.

“Few of those presidents, if any, think raising much more revenue is possible,” Kirwan said. “Additional revenue won’t solve the problem. You could put it on a wish list, but we heard the realism today that we cannot solve this problem with more revenue. Everyone understands that.”

But there appears to be no consensus at this point on what to do about it.

Kirwan cited a presentation from Dutch Baughman, the executive director of the Division IA Athletics Directors’ Association, suggesting that ADs might be willing to consider proposals that would shorten seasons and reduce games in some sports to get at the cost issue (Division II is considering similar proposals in its “Life in the Balance” initiative at the 2010 Convention), but Kirwan and Turner both agreed that until Division I presidents collectively admit that change is necessary, any significant effort to scale back may stall.

“But we are in an environment that demands change,” Kirwan said. “What I take away from this meeting is a consensus that things have to change.”