Jan 5, 2010 11:01:11 AM

The Knight Commission will use next week's NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports to encourage the Association to address the financial crisis in intercollegiate athletics.

Southern Methodist University President R. Gerald Turner will join Knight Commission Executive Director Amy Perko and Richard Hesel, whose Art & Science Group surveyed Football Bowl Subdivision presidents about the state of affairs in athletics, in a presentation designed to reveal a widespread desire for change in fiscal matters.

The presentation is one of four at the January 12-13 Colloquium held in conjunction with the NCAA Convention in Atlanta. This year's Colloquium is the third since the late NCAA President Myles Brand established the sessions in 2008 to fuel scholarly research that would help inform decision-making in intercollegiate athletics. Other primary speakers this year are Rodney Fort from Michigan, Richard Lapchick from Central Florida and Andrew Zimbalist from Smith College. All will focus on how the economic recession is affecting college sports.

The Knight Commission's presentation may most reflect how the economy threatens not only athletics but higher education itself. Presenters will focus on results from the Commission's presidential survey indicating that the current financial model in big-time college athletics is not sustainable. Equally disturbing, though, is the consensus that presidents are unlikely to act unilaterally to create change.

"Everyone who loves intercollegiate athletics knows it is at risk because of the escalation in its cost," Turner said. "There is an openness, willingness and hopefulness for change, but the pessimism in the survey is a reflection of a lack of power to act individually or even by conference."

Thus, Turner said the Knight Commission wants to mediate a collaborative effort among NCAA members to implement change, much the same way the Association has done with academic reform. The challenge in the fiscal arena, however, is the inability to restrain spending (because of antitrust law) and the effect of moderation on competitive equity.

Turner believes the time is right to at least take the discussion seriously. As co-chair of the Knight Commission (along with Maryland system head Brit Kirwan) for several years and one of four subcommittee chairs on the NCAA Presidential Task Force (which called for a moderation in athletics spending four years ago), Turner has witnessed a momentum shift among his peers that has been accelerated by the current economy.

"The recession has brought to the fore on campuses their subsidies and the fact that their academic budgets are either going down or barely rising while their athletics expenditures seem immune," Turner said. "Internal transfers are getting harder to make, and increases in income are not regarded as the salvation of the economic problems."

Turner and Kirwan made the latter point in a recent Washington Post editorial in which they said a football playoff – which some see as a financial panacea – would only exacerbate the fundamental financial problems in intercollegiate athletics.

"The real crisis facing college athletics is the sustainability of its business model, which is on a path toward meltdown," Turner and Kirwan wrote in the December 19 op-ed. "The core of any debate about major-college football must be about the need to develop a business model consistent with the economic realities of our time and that would benefit student-athletes and educational institutions alike."

Turner said nobody knows right now what the correct business model might be, but he pointed out that the same was true years ago with academic reform. Few realized during the implementation of Prop 48 and Prop 16 in the 1980s and 1990s that it would lead to the successful eligibility standards and performance metrics (the Academic Progress Rate) of today. At the time, all people knew was that the status quo needed an overhaul.

Turner believes the financial discussion is in a similarly formative stage.

"I don't think we have the luxury of 20 years to figure it out," he conceded. "What the commission is trying to do is facilitate the beginning of the conversation. The NCAA membership will come up with a solution, just like it did with APR."

That means the entire FBS membership, Turner said, not just those feeling the most painful pinch.

"It's going to require a national effort, and ultimately that is the NCAA – that's the only way all 120 of us in the Football Bowl Subdivision, where the problems are most acute, are organized," he said.

"It's not hard to see why the six major conferences probably aren't going to lead the way in this – what we need is to create the kind of national resolve that carries along with it enough common good that even schools that don't have financial stress will be willing to change for the good of the enterprise."

Other Colloquium highlights

Turner's presentation is at 3 p.m. Tuesday, January 12. It follows a lead-off presentation from Fort, a professor at Michigan's Center for Sport Management. He also will question the sustainability of the current financial model.

On Day 2 of the Colloquium on January 13, Lapchick will examine how the economic slump affects diversity and inclusion in college athletics. Zimbalist wraps up the featured presentations that afternoon with a study of how budget cuts affect decision-making in athletics.

In addition to the four primary speakers, this year's Colloquium offers five "free paper" sessions that give the podium to several other speakers.

John Thelin, university research professor at Kentucky, and Bob Simon, philosophy professor at Union (New York) – both of whom are on the Colloquium's editorial and advisory board – selected about two dozen free papers from more than 50 submissions. Those papers, which are condensed versions of larger works, will be presented in five 75-minute sessions during the course of the Colloquium. The selections are grouped into the following categories:

• Taxation and Legal Issues of College Sports Programs
• Title IX: Gender, Equity and College Sports
• Conferences and Costs: Budgets and Accountability
• Bowls, Brands and Broadcasts
• Recruiting and Retention – College Student-Athlete Issues

Colloquium board chair Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science at Penn State, called the entirety of this year's Colloquium lineup "our most provocative to date."

"It will be a presentation that athletics administrators and scholars alike won't want to miss," he said. "The board selected the economics theme even before members knew how big the problem was going to be. We would think more ADs and associate and assistant ADs would find this program interesting, because it does have to do with sustainability and the future profile of athletics, given market pressures."

See the entire Colloquium schedule here.