Bruce Johnson, sports economics professor
Centre College
USA Today

"The NCAA (wanting) to restore academic integrity to big-time college sports by tinkering with admission standards and graduation requirements (is) like a chain smoker giving up fried chicken to improve his health.

"The reforms ignore the gravest threat to academic integrity -- big money. As long as schools lust after berths in BCS games and Final Fours, academics will take a back seat to sports.

"In their quest for athletics glory and riches, universities build palatial stadiums and practice facilities. They sign coaches to million-dollar contracts. To pay for it all, they must recruit enough top athletes to win. ...

"Schools will find new ways to admit athletes and enroll them in sham courses to keep them eligible. Eligibility, not educability, pays the bills. It has always been so. Recruiting and academic scandals began in the 19th century and have survived every reform effort since the NCAA began in 1906. The new reforms are even less likely to succeed. The money in sports, the number of schools competing and the pressures to win are bigger than ever."

Bob Eno, faculty senate president
Indiana University, Bloomington
New York Times

"If intercollegiate sports were a TV show, everything might seem fine. But it is actually part of an institution whose mission is academics. And when we see something significantly diverting from that mission, it is our job to get upset. We are the stewards of that mission."

Bob Bowlsby, director of athletics
University of Iowa
New York Times

"Those (faculty senates) groups cannot manage the logistics of change; they don't know what questions to ask. They can define parameters, but it will have to come back to faculty athletics representatives, university presidents and athletics administrators. We know where the bodies are buried. ...

"There are certainly plenty of things wrong with college athletics, and we can use assistance and forums for seeking remedies. There has already been much change, and more incremental change is inevitable. But some of these conversations sound an awful lot like what was being said about athletics and education at the beginning of the 20th century. It's all the same issues. It has always been a multiheaded monster.

"But like I tell my staff all the time: you eat the elephant one bite at a time."

Bob Ryan, columnist
Boston Globe

"In strictest terms, the (athletics scholarship) system has never made any sense. What, after all, is the purpose of a college or university? Is it to educate people or is it to entertain either its own community or the public at large by staging intercollegiate athletics competition? ...

"Many (Division I) schools have invested many millions of dollars in glittering athletics facilities. Certain state universities are the biggest and most prestigious athletics entities in their states. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of their citizens regard their football and basketball teams as sources of immense state pride.

"Their interests cannot possibly coincide with those of Harvard, Holy Cross, or even Boston College. ... What does Jacksonville State possibly have in common with Stanford? And yet both are Division I basketball schools.

"Is it a system worth saving? Is there any real justification for the athletics scholarship? These are questions we're way beyond asking. The American fascination with high-level intercollegiate sports is ingrained. We as a devoted sporting nation are committed to this system. We have no choice. We must attempt to police it. ...

"It's a system that can and has been abused, as we all know. But it's also a system that has given us a Supreme Court Justice (Byron 'Whizzer' White), a president (Gerald Ford), and a U.S. senator or two (Bill Bradley), not to mention countless doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and thousands of others who have served their communities well by utilizing the free education they got by virtue of being a, yup, 'jock.'

"In time, those 'non-academic' schools may have to band together, allowing those 'academic schools' to set their own policies. An umbrella that houses both Memphis and Colgate might be a bit too large to make any rational sense. But we are still talking about tinkering, not abolishing. Athletics scholarships are as American as ice cream sundaes or cheese puffs."