NCAA president discusses fiscal irresponsibility

Myles Brand, the current president of the NCAA, is cast in a different mold than his predecessors. Instead of the usual prerequisite foundation as an athlete or coach, Brand brought two decades of experience as a collegiate administrator and two decades of work as a professor to his new position, leading the institution that governs the athletic endeavors of more than 1000 active colleges across the nation. With the NCAA coming under fire for such issues as the attrition of players to professional leagues and team programs that recruit by offering money and substantial gifts as leverage, perhaps Brand's new perspective is exactly what the NCAA needs.

Brand decided on Monday night to discuss what he sees as the primary evil corrupting college sports — fiscal irresponsibility. His main concern involves the idea that intercollegiate sports have transcended the arena of amateurism and have become a spectacle associated more with revenue than with competition.

"Financial pressures are serious challenges to both the myth and matter of college sports," Brand said. "Failing to act is to allow the drift towards professionalism to continue."

Still, beleaguered university athletic directors deserve empathy. Very few athletic programs actually make money, and only two sports — football and men's basketball — are widely considered to be revenue producing. Therefore, as athletic departments pour substantially larger percentages of their budgets into these two lucrative areas in an attempt to generate greater revenue, other programs are woefully neglected. Brand is loath to attribute these monetary concerns to the advent of Title IX, however.

"Individual institutions make decisions on how they want to allocate their funds," he said. "Title IX doesn't tell you which programs to support."

In reality, athletics cannot be self-sufficient. Therefore, athletic programs must be willing to integrate themselves into the universities as a whole. However, he stressed that Princeton and the Ivy League are not the targets of his wrath.

"[Ivy League schools] subsidize athletics because they value the role athletics has in creating an enriched collegiate experience," Brand said.

While these fiscal difficulties are Brand's current fixation, he extends his purview to other areas of athletics as well.

"Sports are distorting the mission of universities," Brand said. "Athletics subserve the academic missions of the institution."

As an academic, Brand feels that the student part of "student-athlete" is being squeezed out. Too many players approach college with the mindset that it is a place to sleep, practice, and party and not a setting to receive an education. Therefore, one of the first major initiatives he undertook was to pass tougher academic standards for athletes and for programs in general. Programs in which the athletes' academic performance remain well below that of an institution's other students, will be scrutinized and sanctioned. If a student leaves the university in poor academic standing, the team will not be able to replace his or her scholarship. If poor academics become the norm rather than the exception, scholarships are lost entirely. The ultimate threat is decertification of the athletic program.

Finally, Brand discussed the growing trend of players, especially in basketball, to leave college early or bypass it entirely in favor of professional leagues.

"There is nothing wrong if someone leaves as long as they have a good career ahead of them," Brand said. "What I worry about are all the young men who starting in the 8th grade or earlier are convinced they're going to be the next LeBron James."

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Brand's thesis is one worth dialogue on the Princeton campus. Do intercollegiate athletics in an academic environment drift away from the essence of the university and veer into the realm of entertainment? Or, can they be re-prioritized as a healthy and vibrant aspect of the college experience. At Princeton, do we have it right, or can we get it right?