Trustees and Presidents: A Podcast for University Leaders On College Athletics

"This may be the most significant development for athlete's economic rights in our lifetime"- Walt Harrison, former chair of the NCAA President's Council.

Your athletic program is about to look very different.

Simply put, some of your athletes on campus are about to elevate their brand (and their income) while playing for your school. What that will look like is being hotly debated right now, with many groups weighing in (including asking for Congressional intervention). College Athletics at all levels will soon look very different once "Names, Images and Likenesses" is fully implemented nationwide. 

Affecting all NCAA and NAIA divisions, it's important for those who aspire to be a campus senior leader to understand what this means, how this works, and the massive compliance issues at play.

My guest today will walk us through the issues, the need for external oversight, and the position of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a long time advocate for academic changes and fiscal responsibility. Joining our conversation, and representing the KCIA, is President Emeritus of the University of Hartford, Dr. Walter Harrison.

Many of my listeners know this topic has been quite controversial. In Fall of 2019, California became the first state to pass legislation to permit college athletes to get “paid” (if you will) for their brand on social media platforms, teaching sport skills, and other things that regular college students were permitted to do.

Now, the NCAA is “on the clock”, and is under great pressure to design a solution that doesn’t create a “pay for play” recruiting situation. It is a challenging proposition. How will your school adapt?

Here are the 5 basic principles of fairness as proposed by the Knight Commission, and referenced in the discussion:

1. Fairness to Athletes as Students

2. Informing Athletes on NIL Rights

3. Oversight of NIL Rights

4. Guardrails for NIL Rights

5. National uniformity.

Beginning on September 16, the KCIA will host a series of four virtual forums titled "Transforming the Division I Model".  Registration is now open.

Full disclosure:  I served as a researcher to the KCIA this summer.

A conversation exploring college athletics not from the court, field, or locker room…but from the board room.

From the White House to the Big House and everywhere in between, there’s a remarkable amount of chatter about the decisions being made and those making the decisions. But for all we hear about and chancellors, athletics directors and commissioners, there’s one group we don’t hear much about: trustees.

Guest host Scott Flanagan talks with Peter Eckel, Ed. D to explore the appropriate role for trustees in decision making around intercollegiate athletics. This conversation approaches intercollegiate athletics through a different lens…one that isn’t about wins and losses, TV contracts, business models, or enrollment goals. 

We explore the unique and important role trustees can play in asking the right questions, putting intercollegiate athletics in a broader context, and supporting leaders during this unprecedented time of extended stress.

Peter is a long-time researcher and practitioner of university governance. He currently serves the co-director of the Penn Project on University Governance, has directly advanced trusteeship through his work at the Association of Governing Boards, and is a noted author whose most recent work (Practical Wisdom: Thinking Differently about College and University Governance, co-authored with Cathy Trower) reframes the work of board leadership.

An important conversation for those who want to understand the role that Boards should and should not play in athletics decisions.

The American Rivers Conference (ARC) was set. The President's Council had been meeting throughout the summer, tracking localized Covid-19 trends, and ensuring their safety protocols were in place. Then, in mid August, the NCAA came out with updated "Resocialization Guidelines", and announcing that fall Division III NCAA championships were cancelled. Despite their careful planning, the decision was taken out of their hands by the NCAA.

What is interesting about this decision is that the NCAA did NOT do this for NCAA Division I; in fact, the confusion that exists between the Power 5 conferences about playing football and other fall sports, might have been eliminated had the NCAA been consistent. Instead, the NCAA took away the prerogative promised earlier to the Division III Conferences.

My conversation with Darrin Good, President at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska takes the listener through the decisions the Conference made, and their shock in discovering that the NCAA would suddenly take the decision out of their hands late in the summer. 

Dr. Good told Omaha.com:

""We are extremely disappointed that our football, volleyball and men's and women's soccer teams will not compete this fall," Nebraska Wesleyan President Darrin Good said. "Nebraska Wesleyan, along with the other eight American Rivers Conference schools, have worked tirelessly for the past several months to plan and implement the necessary protocols that would create a safe environment for our fall sports' student-athletes, and we were confident in our protocols."

Good pointed out that the ARC was the last of 44 NCAA Division III conferences to postpone fall sports.

**NOTE--Nebraska Wesleyan won their most recent National Championship in 2018...congratulations!

The NCAA is failing college football.

In August 2020, college sports leaders witnessed the limits of the power that NCAA President Mark Emmert has to control the five most visible Conferences--the ACC, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the SEC. In the span of 24 hours, two conferences announced they were not going to play their fall sports schedules-the Big Ten and the Pac-12. As of the mid-August, the ACC, the Big 12 and the SEC have continued to operate as if they are planning to play their fall schedules.

I invited Nancy Zimpher to the podcast to talk about where we are in NCAA Division I athletics today. Nancy has been the Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, President of the University of Cincinnati, and the Chancellor of the SUNY (State Universities of New York) System. She has served on the NCAA Board of Governors, and is currently a member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. She chairs the Governance subcommittee for the Knight Commission, which is currently examining proposals for new models for Division I college athletics.

She and her colleague at the Knight Commission, former MLB CFO Jonathan Mariner, co-authored an article for MarketWatch about the challenges facing big time college sports and the revenue crisis facing the Power 5 conferences.

Nancy is currently leading an institute through the Association of Governing Boards that develops new college Presidents. This is a fascinating conversation about what the challenges and opportunities are, and the important role that Presidents have in leading change.

It seems like everyone is talking about money--the money made in college sports in general, and the money that may be lost as a result of this pandemic. With fall football being cancelled in both the Big Ten and the Pac-12, I reached out to Patrick Crakes, currently of Crakes Media Co, and a former Senior Vice President of FOX Sports Media Group who oversaw Programming, Research and Content Strategy. I asked him to comment about the current state of finances of college sports media, and which of the two conferences- the Big Ten and the Pac 12, were likely to see some form of media revenue reductions from their distribution partners, advertisers and contractual obligations.

If you're interested in who's getting paid and who's not (and how that decision gets made), this is the podcast for you. I also covered this conversation for Forbes.com this week.

This conversation may surprise you. And it might give you insight into why some schools ARE playing sports this fall.

Following weeks of announcements from conferences across the nation postponing fall competitions until next spring, the NCAA recently announced that they would not hold championships for Division II or Division III for fall sports; around the same time, the NAIA did the same. Shortly thereafter the Mid-American Conference and the Mountain West postponed all fall sports, followed in quick succession by the Big Ten and Pac 12.

In today’s podcast, guest host and former college President Scott Flanagan has a conversation with David Armstrong, President at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, FL. An NAIA institution heading into just its second football season, St. Thomas is heading into fall sports full speed ahead. Armstrong shares his perspective on the role athletics plays for a campus and for its students, how he views the issue of safety for student-athletes, the role that finances play in understanding different decisions made by different conferences and institutions…and why he is comfortable with and confident in the approach his university and conference are taking.

This podcast strives to present balanced perspectives on the issues facing college sports-including whether they should be played in Fall 2020. 

To lighten it up a bit (and hopefully make you smile), I'm joined by my colleague Ross Aikins to do some sports bantering. Ross (who is a public health scholar who loves sports) and I (on a steep learning curve about public health issues) have created a highly sophisticated system of ranking the 27 NCAA sports and the chances they will (or should) play in 2020-21. (HA!)

RED: No way the sport should get anywhere near the field/court/pool

YELLOW: With modifications

GREEN: Go for it.

After this podcast, I will be taking August off. I'll be back with Season 2 in September.

The number of college conferences that have suspended, modified or cancelled Fall sports in mind numbing. Presidents and Commissioners have had to make tremendously difficult decisions--the cancelling of a fall season could mean those athletes don't return to campus.

The Northeastern, MidAtlantic and Midwestern portions of the country are packed with small colleges (mostly private), whose primary sources of revenue are the tuition dollars paid by their students. While all understand the complexities of playing team sports in a Covid-19 era, it's still a personal loss for every one of those students.

How many of those athletes will chose to continue their studies? How many will stop out and take a "gap" year? My conversation with KYW Radio's Matt Leon talks about the July 2020 landscape for all of college sports.

In July 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing called "Protecting the Integrity of College Athletics". Led by Senators Blumenthal, Graham and Booker, the Committee announced their intent to create a "College Athletes Bill of Rights" tied to a reform agenda with Names, Images and Likenesses legislation.  The Bill of Rights includes:

· Empowers and protects economic rights of athletes;

· Allows athletes to market their NIL individually and in group licenses;

· Ensure athletes can negotiate revenue sharing agreements with athletic associations, conferences and schools;

· Empower and protect an athlete’s rights to an education; enable them beyond their academic and athletic career, guarantee lifetime scholarships;

· Create and empower transparency, and give the athletes the right to hold accountable their schools;

· Create an oversight panel for the regulation of agents and third-party NIL deals, making sure they have a real voice;

· Protect the health and wellbeing of college athletes; unacceptable that there is no standardized injury reporting process (including concussions).

Joining me to talk about this issue is Kendall Spencer, former chair of the National Student Athlete Advisory Council (SAAC). Kendall is a recent graduate of Georgetown Law, and hopes to compete in the 2021 Tokyo Olympic games. Kendall and I discuss the increasing activism of college athletes and how they can collectively use their voices to affect change that levels the playing field for athletes.

In July, Stanford announced they were dropping 11 Olympic sports, going from 36 to 25 total sports. The Cardinal are the most successful overall Division I athletics program in the last 20 years, yet they have been struggling with keeping up financially with other Power 5 Conferences. The big question is why, and we'll try to answer that today.

My guest today is Jon Wilner, the Pac-12 beat reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, and expert on Pac-12 media revenues.

Jon will walk us through how the Pac-12 media contracts are structured and why the Conference crafted a different direction than other conference networks. The decision has, so far, not been a good one for the schools, as their revenues are lagging far behind their Big Ten and SEC counterparts.

This podcast will help you understand how the college sports media landscape works.