INDIANAPOLIS---As the NCAA began its year-long Centennial celebration at its 100th Annual Convention, President Myles Brand called on the Association’s member colleges and universities to influence the future with forethought and care.
“Our first century is in the books,” Brand said. “Ours is an awesome and grand trust. We are trusted with the future of college sports (which) must lead us to recognize that at the very core of intercollegiate athletics is the student-athlete.”
Brand delivered his remarks in his annual State of the Association speech during Saturday’s opening business session. More than 3,000 delegates were registered for the Convention that got underway Friday, January 6, and will conclude Monday, January 9, in Indianapolis.
The NCAA president employed the Centennial theme, “Celebrate the Student-Athlete,” to help set the tone for the Convention and the year ahead. And he used the major portion of the speech to advocate for the collegiate model of athletics, a theme he has employed throughout the first three years of his administration.
He said that there are three key principles that constitute the collegiate model.
“Those who participate in intercollegiate athletics are to be students attending a university or college,” Brand said of the first principle.
The second principle, he said, relates to the contests, which must be “fair, conducted with integrity, and the safety and well-being of those who participate are paramount.”
The third principle describes the enterprise as a whole. “Intercollegiate athletics is to be wholly embedded in universities and colleges,” Brand said, “and the values of higher education are to be the values of college sports.”
Brand called these three “the bedrock principles of 1906, and they are the bedrock principles of 2006.
College sports, the NCAA president noted, both shape and is shaped by American culture, and pointed out that America is the only country in the world that integrates sports with education.
“The fact of the matter is that, what began a hundred years ago in the marriage of sports and colleges is as American and as celebrated by Americans as apple pie and the Fourth of July,” he said.
Brand went into detail on each of the three principles in his 40-minute speech, discussing the academic reform efforts as a reaffirmation of the student participant; the basis for why student-athletes should not be paid; the importance of integrity and fairness in the conduct of intercollegiate athletics and the role of the NCAA in enforcing the policies and bylaws set by member schools; the necessity for presidential leadership in the governance of college sports; the importance of diversity and inclusion in hiring and participation practices; and his continued strong support for Title IX.
But Brand devoted much of his speech to an examination of the underlying financial structure of intercollegiate athletics.
“There is significant misunderstanding not only of the financial model for athletics,” he said, “but how it mirrors the approach for the rest of higher education.”
The NCAA president noted that higher education must maximize revenues from a number of sources and then redistribute those revenues according to institutions’ academic missions. He said that higher education must generate significant amounts of revenue and operate as a sound business on the
input side, but behave as a classic not-for-profit on the output side and distribute resources to those programs incapable of generating sufficient revenues on their own.
“On a smaller but similar scale,” he said, “the business plan for the athletics department mirrors that of the university. Revenue is maximized in order to meet the mission and strategic emphasis of the department.”
And the mission of the athletics department, according to Brand, is to maximize the number of student-athletes participating at a competitive level across sports because athletics participation enhances the educational experience of students. He called this the key relationship of athletics and higher education.
“We want to maximize the number of student-athletes competing at a competitive level, and we do this because athletics participation enhances the educational experience,” Brand said, “and enhancing the educational experience of students is the goal of higher education. This is the collegiate model of sports.”
College sports has an obligation to conduct its revenue-generating activities in a productive and sound business-like manner.
“Anything less would be incompetence at best and malfeasance at worst,” he said. “That is, on the revenue side, the input side, athletics, like the university itself, must follow the best business practices. On the expenditure side, the out-put side, athletics must follow its not-for-profit mission.”
The idea that athletics is embedded into the university mission places a crucial constraint on how athletics generate revenues, Brand said. Intercollegiate athletics departments “inherit their values from their universities. The business activities of the athletics department must be informed and in conformity with the values of the university, and higher education in general.”
He acknowledged that there is ambivalence about the relationship between athletics and business activities, noting that critics and others believe it is not quite right for college sports to be engaged in business activity. There is a sense, he said, that amateur sports should be above all that, and that while everyone understands that athletics departments need revenue, working too hard to generate revenue taints the purity of college sports.
“Nonsense,” Brand said. “The type of thinking is both a misinterpretation and a misapplication of amateurism. ‘Amateur’ defines the participants, not the enterprise. We should not be ambivalent about doing the business of college sports. We should do it well, but always in conformity with the principles of higher education.”
In his conclusion, Brand pointed out that the future is unknown because it is not fixed.
“Of this, I am certain,” he said. “We must be guided by the three principles fundamental to collegiate athletics. The student-athlete is to be the center of all that we do. The contests in which they complete are to be safe and undertaken with integrity. And intercollegiate athletics is to be embedded into the mission of higher education on each of our campuses, and within the NCAA.”
In addition, Brand said, the values of higher education are to be the values of intercollegiate athletics.
“Let us celebrate all the participants, the literally millions and millions of young women and men who played, now play and will play in our athletics contests and who attend our institutions of higher education,” he said. “Cheers to all of them, past, present and future.
“Let’s celebrate the student-athlete.”
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