By Staff
Athletic Management, 17.2, February/March 2005, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1702/questionoftheday.htm
Should the NCAA alter its three-division structure?
Ted Kissell
Athletic Director,
University of Dayton,
NCAA Division I-AA
I think that to further subdivide would be making a distinction without a difference. At one time there was discussion about the most prominent I-A football programs seceding from the NCAA. But by creating a construct of their own—the BCS—they were able to create their own category within the NCAA structure.
I don’t think that these kinds of divisions or differences in distinction can be mandated by the NCAA. Institutional and conference decisions are going to create those distinctions, which is what’s happening right now.
For example, we have a separate football construct with the BCS, and yet within Division I, everybody has access to the men’s basketball tournament. At Dayton, we compete at the highest level in basketball but not football, and that works for us. I think it’s so healthy for Division I institutions to have the results we’ve seen over the years in basketball, where smaller schools that aren’t in BCS conferences have been able to advance deep into the tournament.
In football we were forced by the new rules to become Division I after having been very successful in Division III. Since then, we have found similar institutions that share our philosophy of non-scholarship football, and we’ve continued to play non-scholarship football within the Division I structure. Individual conferences and individual institutions can still find ways to make things work. We’ve got to have a notion of selective excellence. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all.
Russell Rogers
Director of Physical Education, Athletics, and Recreation,
Stevens Institute of Technology,
NCAA Division III
There certainly are problems within each separate division—I don’t think any of us would deny that. But I’m a big believer in institutional autonomy and control. Each institution makes its financial decisions and prioritizes based on what it deems important.
We’ve tried to create our own niche for success and determine what that means for Stevens, and I think each school needs to approach it that way. In Division III you can’t base your success on comparisons with very different schools.
I’m not sure how subdividing our division would work. How do you determine it? Is it self-selection, or does someone select for you? It may bring us more questions than answers if something like that were to happen.
At this point, we choose our conference affiliation and we also choose our opponents for non-conference contests. Those choices should reflect our available resources and our goals and objectives for the athletics program. The current system can work if we don’t get too caught up in who the national champion turns out to be.
I think it’s important, ultimately, for member schools to evaluate themselves in a fair and equitable way based on their resources. We need to be careful in how we evaluate the meaning of success.
Roger Ingles
Athletic Director and Head Baseball Coach,
Ohio Wesleyan University,
NCAA Division III
I prefer the way it’s set up now, but I also understand the reasoning behind looking at different possibilities for the future because of the enormous growth—especially within Division III. I’m all about maximizing playing and championship opportunities for student-athletes, so I think there has to be either a restructuring or an expansion of playoff opportunities. I would prefer that we stick with the current format and just increase the number of opportunities, but if we need to split into two different divisions, I think that would be fine, too.
However, we have such diversity in the types of institutions within Division III that I’m not sure there’s an easy way to split into two separate divisions. Do you split it based on the size of institutions? Do you split it based on the number of sports offered by those institutions?
Division III is all about creating many opportunities for student-athletes to compete. A Division IV that specializes in fewer sports and does not offer a broad-based athletic program may be the solution.
Robert Hartwell
Director of Athletics,
Adelphi University,
NCAA Division II
The three-tier setup works well for Adelphi. Being in Division II, we are believers in athletically-related aid. It’s a good competitive division for athletes who probably have not thought a lot about going professional, although there are some opportunities for Division II players to get involved professionally.
The problem is that a number of schools in Division II flirt with the idea of moving up to Division I because of the amount of money they see floating around in Division I—money that filters down to schools even if they don’t make the NCAA tournaments. And since the newspapers in major cities predominately cover Division I athletics, some schools feel that it would help their admissions process to be a Division I institution instead of Division II or III.
No matter how you look at any kind of divisional breakup, there are going to be those who have, and those who have not. In terms of competitive equity, I think in Division II there is a more open playing field than in Division I, which I believe is healthy. In Division II, a lot of times you see different schools or conferences rising to the top, then two or three years later another conference starts winning.
Jim Jarret
Athletic Director,
Old Dominion University,
NCAA Division I-AAA
The key thing in my mind is to have fair competition for our student-athletes. As I see it, that is broken down into two parts: One is conference competition and the other is national competition. The conference competition obviously encompasses the vast majority of our contests, but there are some problems there because schools are tiering sports and you have an imbalance between highly-skilled programs and low-skilled programs within conferences.
In Division I, I think they ought to do away with the subdivisions altogether. In football it’s basically the BCS schools versus the rest. But they’re all Division I, and with regard to sports other than football, there are a number of non-BCS schools that are very, very strong in other sports, Old Dominion being one of them.
I wouldn’t mind discussing the possibility of eliminating the BCS and having Division I football championships. I’d like to see I-AA football not be a separate subdivision, but rather have a championship for all of Division I. Because with the I-AA designation, that subdivision gets relegated to second-rate status.
Right now at Old Dominion we don’t have football, but we’re talking about possibly adding it. The interesting thing with the I-AAA classification that we now have is that it’s really meaningless in terms of competition. We look at ourselves as a Division I program. We’ve got what we call a "selective excellence" base and we’ve got eight sports for men and eight sports for women, and we try to be nationally competitive in all of them. We’ve won over 20 national championships and we’re trying to compete with the best, so we don’t see the subdivision classification as having a whole lot of merit as it relates to our program.
Tim Murray
Director of Athletics,
Marist College,
NCAA Division I-AA
I feel very comfortable with the divisional structure within the NCAA because it provides institutions the opportunity to select the level of athletics which is consistent with the mission of the institution. The men’s basketball championships have been terrific in terms of providing broad interest. It has had a major impact on Division I, and I think that the women’s tournament is slowly building that same kind of competitive equity.
I do, however, have a concern for football and the BCS categorization. I don’t feel it would ever be good for those schools to have continued separation within Division I. The breadth of schools that we have in Division I really adds a great deal to the level of competition in all sports.
In Olympic sports, I think that the introduction of the automatic qualification for many of their championships has added a great deal to the classification of Division I within the NCAA. It provides championship opportunities for some conferences and schools that didn’t have those opportunities 10 years ago. I like where we’re at now and I would be fearful of any type of additional separation within Division I.
Joni Comstock,
Director of Athletics,
American University,
NCAA Division I-AAA
The current three-division structure of the NCAA is a functional structure. However, I do believe there is a need to more closely examine the minimum requirements for membership in each and also the revenue distribution currently used at the Division I level.
The NCAA basketball tournaments are the most valuable properties for the Association. As such, changing the make-up of the tournament by changing the membership would be a potential threat. Also, regardless of divisions, there will always be great disparities in resources. The NCAA should assist in monitoring the quality of the experience of the student-athletes, specifically the resources and support available to them. This would be more effective than adding divisions.
Chad Yowell
Director of Athletics,
Wheaton College,
NCAA Division III
Should Division III consider subdividing? I would say no. Over the past few years Division III has worked very hard to keep itself together, and from surveys done by the NCAA, the membership has indicated that the majority are not interested in subdivision.
I believe what many consider the reason for subdividing—that we are too diverse—is the reason we should stay together. In my opinion our diversity provides the checks and balances that Division III needs. For Division III to continue to meet the needs of individual members, conferences, and student-athletes, we need debate. I believe that if we subdivided, much of the most important debate would be gone.
Also, I personally like the opportunity to play any Division III school, even ones that may do things a little differently than we do. The conference structure is where we should be bringing together like schools that have specific needs or wants.
We must remember that the NCAA rules are the minimum standard, so if conferences or independents want to have stricter rules, they can do that. I have also not seen anything so far that would lead me to believe that any one type of college (private, public, large, small) has dominated our championships.
Do we need to continue to review what direction Division III is going in and make sure we are following our philosophy? Yes. Can we accomplish this without subdivision? I believe we can.