The long-awaited report of the official recommendations of the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee was released on Tuesday, and among the most notable elements of the 39-page document is the previously reported action this would allow Division I sports to hold post-season tournaments for up to 25% of a sport’s membership.
The caveat being that only sports with at least 200 participating schools would be eligible to potentially act on that 25% number.
One of the potential outcomes of these recommendations could be the expansion of NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments down the road. However, industry sources told CBS Sports that there isn’t much momentum for this change in the near future. There remains the possibility that the NCAA Tournament is not developing at all, sources told CBS Sports. If the committee’s full range of recommendations are formally adopted, as expected at the NCAA convention next week, it would see both men’s and women’s tournaments grow from their current size of 68 to 90 (out of 363 schools). Conversely, if the expansion ever happens, it could also mean an increase on a minor scale: from 68 to 72.
The NCAA tournament contract with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports races to the year 2032.
Over the past 12 months, the committee has considered: what it meant to be and/or qualify as a Division I institution; what has been the student-athlete experience and how it could be improved; how all DI sports are governed; how post-season championships are constructed and access protocols for qualification; how money is shared in Division I; the student-athlete transfer environment; and enforcement of the NCAA Lite Rulebook.
The 21-person panel was formed at the request of outgoing NCAA President Mark Emmert, who urged action after a landmark Supreme Court antitrust case was ruled 9-0 against the NCAA in June. 2021. The committee was co-chaired by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and Ohio University Athletic Director Julie Cromer. The group met on a mostly weekly basis throughout 2022, with their charge being to tweak both the general features and more granular details of The Division I.
But the report is not the landscape-changing event that many college athletes were anticipating. Rather, much of what was released on Tuesday was telegraphed for months by Sankey and Cromer in their previous comments to the media and in closed-door discussions with senior college athletics officials last fall. Many of these recommendations are expected to take years to be ratified. For the intentions and purposes of their effects on college sports for the average fan, many of the changes will not be noticeable.
Division I is not going to shrink in size nor is it going to be split into multiple tiers as previously speculated.
“We also made a critical choice early on to maintain a ‘big tent’ approach to Division I,” states the report. “While the breadth and diversity of Division I presents challenges, it is also a fundamental part of the magic of college sports. In the opinion of the committee – and in the opinion of most outside voices who have joined us – breaking Division I would harm what is “vital and essential to college sports. As long as their universities can meet the minimum expectations in terms of the support they provide, at the end of the day, we want as many student-athletes as possible to start each season with dreams of a Division I national championship.”
For football, the committee asked that the attendance requirements to participate in FBS be reviewed, “to determine whether to maintain the current attendance standard while focusing on other elements that more directly tie the experience of the student-athlete to the expectations of the FBS membership criteria This review should be established by the Division I Board of Directors, involve key experts and leaders among the FBS membership, and focus on drawing more effective distinctions between the subdivisions of football.”
In the end, the committee chose not to recommend college football to move away from being legislated under the jurisdiction of the NCAA. Throughout 2022, there was a lingering curiosity that the sport could separate from the NCAA altogether, but that’s not part of the calculation here.
The recommendations are not mandates, and all of them are expected to be voted on by the Division I Board of Directors at the NCAA’s annual convention in San Antonio, Texas, next week.
One of the main points of change that the committee wants, and what drives the report, is “enhanced support for the mental, physical, and academic well-being of student-athletes.” The recommendation, if approved, would require every DI institution to account for health insurance for all college athletic-related injuries — including two years after graduation.
The committee also recommended improved and expanded college athletic benefits, including financial support, travel, food, and a variety of other day-to-day benefits.
The committee also encourages each sport to allow for self-governance, which would reduce the autonomy of rules and guidelines intertwining all sports across DI. This would mean that women’s field hockey could deliberately and adopt its own set of rules, even planning and recruiting schedules, which would be different from men’s soccer, women’s basketball or men’s lacrosse.
What would be universal in Division I are the standards and expectations for supporting and enhancing the varsity athlete experience.
There are also recommendations to allow more NCAA revenue to help schools that need to meet some redefined student-athlete welfare specifications. For many universities, being able to afford the resources required in these recommendations will require an influx of funds that these schools do not currently have.
The committee recommended that the NCAA review how revenue is split between DIs and that a change in how money is provided be updated. For decades, the only money-making entity in the NCAA was the NCAA Men’s Tournament. How schools and conferences fared in March Madness determined how much money was distributed among all leagues in multi-year increments. This system could change down the road.
The committee also recommended greater student-athlete representation in decision-making in each DI sport. Under these new guidelines, all varsity athletes would be entitled to four years of scholarships, whether they transferred or not, and would be entitled to complete their education over a 10-year period after someone left college early, if they chose.
The phrase “name, likeness and likeness” appears five times in the Committee’s report, with all references relating to educational efforts and/or litigation issues. There is no set of standards on NIL included in the work of the committee here. The NCAA hopes a national standard will be determined by Congress, but many college athletes have expressed cynicism about the likelihood of that ever materializing.
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