No institution with an athletic program is immune from the mountain of litigation facing college sports. But there is one group that, given the size of its members’ budgets, is in a particularly precarious spot: Division I colleges that are not football powerhouses.
That group could be subject to many of the same legal challenges as members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest competitive level in Division I. They will help pay a $2.75-billion settlement in the recent antitrust case, House v. NCAA, if a judge approves it. They could someday be forced to negotiate with unionized teams if a National Labor Relations Board decision to allow Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team to collectively bargain is upheld.
While colleges in the most lucrative conferences may have the revenue to weather that storm, most Division I colleges just don’t.
Some members of that group have a plan to head off that scenario. Broadly, it seeks to de-professionalize athletics on their campuses, so that sports look more like extracurricular activities and less like jobs. In other words, something resembling amateurism — the model the National Collegiate Athletic Association has used as a legal defense for decades but failed to realize in practice.
Since late last year, a handful of athletic directors and athletes in the other two Division I subdivisions, known as the Football Championship Subdivision and the DI-AAA, have been meeting regularly with a consultant to assemble the plan, which includes proposals they are suggesting the member colleges put into practice. They will present it on Sunday at the annual convention of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, in Las Vegas.
One piece of the plan is a tool for determining when a coach or athletic department is exerting too much control over athletes. A chart that will be presented to member institutions lists appropriate expectations a coach can impose and inappropriate ones that should be avoided because they verge on something more like an employer-employee relationship.
In the green: scholarship offers, eligibility standards, consistent practice times, testing for performance-enhancing drugs, rules against hazing, and education on safety, social media, and athletics, to name a few.
In the red: punishments that include removal from the team, pressure to pursue certain majors, social-media restrictions, control of interactions with the media, unreasonable time commitments, recreational-drug testing, and rules for appearances off the field.
Those no-no’s are common across college athletics. Many of the handbooks athletes must follow spell out protocols like no visiting with family members who travel to away games, prohibitions on certain jewelry and clothing, and restrictions on athletes’ social-media presence. That’s not to mention implicit pressures, such as expectations that athletes play when they are sick or still recovering from an injury.
To create this tool, two college athletes — Meredith Page, a volleyball player at Radford University, and Anthony Egbo Jr., a football player who recently graduated from Abilene Christian University — surveyed their peers on what their coaches required of them. They got about 100 replies from respondents, some of whom they spoke to by phone.
The group creating the tool consulted with lawyers to understand what rules would be seen as exerting too much control over players according to the most recent case law. The idea of control has been a key factor in cases before the NLRB, in which athletes have asked to be recognized as employees and allowed to unionize. A regional NLRB director granted the Dartmouth team the right to unionize because, she determined, the college exerted “significant control” over the players’ work.
The tool is meant to “help staff and coaches understand more about where it’s essential and appropriate to assert control and where that is maybe overreaching,” said Sandy Hatfield Clubb, president of the Pictor Group, the consultancy that worked with the group creating the plan.
A Role in Governance
Another component of the plan is to give students a role in the governance of athletics at their colleges, their conferences, and the NCAA. “The thing that is really driving this model is that student-athlete voice is going to be intimately involved going forward with everything we’re doing,” said Janet R. Cone, director of athletics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and president of the NCAA’s Division I-AAA subdivision.
Many campuses already have athlete advisory committees, Clubb acknowledged. But the amount of power they wield varies. Some get to decide how to spend donors’ big gifts, while others simply plan year-end banquets.
“We want student-athletes involved in policies,” she said.
A third piece of the plan would tie participation on a team more closely to the academic enterprise of a college. At the very least, this piece would mean spelling out learning outcomes that athletes should achieve. Or playing a sport could help athletes earn credits toward a degree, much as acting in a play might count toward a performing-arts major.
“It’s not as simple as, Let’s give them credit for playing,” Clubb said. Athletes could study football plays or volleyball statistics, along with more traditional courses like physiology and nutrition. Clubb envisions certificates, minors, and majors in human performance. Players who want to pursue a biology or engineering degree could still do so, but may be able to get some credit for their time on the field.
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group that has long advocated for educational control of college athletics, sponsored a series of papers by scholars to inform this effort.
On Sunday athletic directors at many other colleges in the NCAA subdivisions will hear details of the plan. No vote will occur — the plan seems to be intended to provide guidance rather than rules — but audience members will be surveyed for their feedback.
“This is a test of how committed we truly are to the college athletic enterprise,” said Brandon Martin, director of athletics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. He said colleges may have to define success in athletics differently than they are used to doing. “Unfortunately there’s going to be some institutions who won’t be in the game.”
Karen Weaver, who teaches about higher education and college sports at the University of Pennsylvania, said it made sense that this group of colleges would want to craft a plan together. She had not seen the plan, but commented on its general direction. “They’re going to have to make some changes in order to not be sued all the time,” she said.
But, she added, change is hard. Coaches have been put under a lot of pressure to perform. Weaver said that anything that looks as if it’s emphasizing something other than winning could be a hard sell.
