Jan 12, 2010 11:31:37 PM

ATLANTA – Opinions about the nature of the financial situation in big-time college sports at yesterday's opening session of the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium were about as divergent as what to do about it.

Under the theme of assessing challenges and opportunities in college sports during recessionary times, presenters Rodney Fort of the University of Michigan and representatives of the Knight Commission both said that the current financial model in Division I is not sustainable, but neither they nor the Colloquium audience suggested how to fix it.

Knight Commission co-chair Gerald Turner said presidents are hungry for change but don't see themselves as the change agents. Fort, meanwhile, looked at change from a historical perspective, noting that big-time athletics have been relatively impervious to previous fiscal crises.

The latter sentiment certainly was supported by Clemson Athletics Director Terry Don Phillips, who in reacting to Fort's paper said not to expect athletics administrators to lead the reform charge any time soon. "Given individual institutions' drive for competitive excellence," he said, "immediate reform will not happen."

The Knight Commission, basing its presentation on a comprehensive survey of Football Bowl Subdivision presidents, said the best chance for effective change might be in the transparency of Division I's spending patterns. Turner said efforts like the NCAA's dashboard indicators project may shed the necessary light on athletics behavior. He compared the effort with academic reform, saying the publicity that surrounded the public release of graduation rates became the tipping point for change.

But Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a professor at the Florida Gulf Coast School of Law and director of the Legal Advocacy Center for Women in Sports, said in her reaction paper to the Knight Commission that transparency would be no more than an exercise in fiscal bravado. "It is the equivalent of people boasting about how much they are spending on a new car," she said. "I question whether transparency will be what leads to the changes we want."

Doug Toma from the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education also provided reaction to the Knight Commission survey, wondering whether the "hopelessness" presidents expressed was more attributable to the "how" of reform rather than the "why."

Toma also said reform proponents should not lose sight of the strategic advantages that athletics affords, since it offers most schools a national branding opportunity and gives communities an easy entry point to the institution. He also said that the budget challenges facing athletics are being replicated in other areas of higher education as well.

So with no consensus on effective solutions to the unsustainable spending, the first question from the audience once the presentations had been completed was, "If we need collective action, what is it and who will start it?"

To that, Turner said, "If the solutions were known, we'd have added another section in our report. But the discussion at least has to begin."

He said the NCAA Division I Board of Directors and other groups likely will generate ideas over the coming months. The Knight Commission also is preparing a comprehensive report to be released this spring.

"Just like when academic reform began getting legs, it took two or three iterations," Turner said. "We may be at that stage here."

The Colloquium wraps up today with presentations from Richard Lapchick on how the economy affects hiring practices and diversity in athletics, and from Andrew Zimbalist on what might be done to arrest the arms race in college sports.