By Staff
Coaching Management, 9.4, May 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0904/bbstudy.htm
Seeking to assess the health and future viability of college football, the NCAA has convened a new committee that will study a variety of issues facing the sport. This follows in the footsteps of a similar group formed to study basketball issues in 1998.
“It’s important to understand that the committee has been developed not because football is broken, but because the sport has reached unprecedented success—and we should never take success for granted,” Committee Chair Charles Wethington, President of the University of Kentucky, said in the Feb. 26, 2001, issue of The NCAA News.
Appointed by the Division I Board of Directors, the Football Study Oversight Committee includes eight university or college presidents plus six non-voting members representing Divisions I-A, I-AA, and II, the Division I Management Council, the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA), and the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).
“One of the things that I find encouraging about the oversight committee is that there are several issues that face college football, and those issues can be approached initially on a very high level,” says AFCA Executive Director Grant Teaff, who serves on the committee. “Many times, initiatives have to be started by the coaches and then work their way up through the various channels of the NCAA. But this committee has a chance to start things at the top.”
At its first meeting in February, the committee outlined five areas of study: student-athlete welfare, including sportsmanship and graduation rates; membership criteria and classification; the two-year moratorium on the number of postseason bowl games; increased financial pressures associated with Division I football; and diversity issues, especially the lack of minority head coaches in Division I football.
As for financial issues, many feel an “arms race” among institutions is threatening the viability of athletic programs. “One of the things that’s going to keep coming up in Division I-A is the amount of money that is being invested in all I-A athletics,” Teaff says. “You look around and see sports being dropped, including football in some places, and a lot of it has to do with the ability of the institutions to handle the demands of gender equity issues. That is something that will be looked at as we go through this.”
Teaff hopes the committee will enable further gains to be made in promoting sportsmanship among student-athletes. “Coaches were the very first ones to be concerned about this, around six or seven years ago, when they made a concerted push through the NCAA rules committee to dramatically change the nuance of the game on the field by implementing sportsmanship rules,” Teaff says. “All coaches feel there needs to be a re-emphasis on the sportsmanship rules. Certainly the coach has a major responsibility, but there is also a responsibility from institutions and the NCAA. We all have to work together to put sportsmanship on the front burner and to make sure that we are going by the spirit of the rules, as well as the rules themselves.”
The committee also plans to address falling graduation rates for football student-athletes, which have dropped eight percent in the past five years. Like several NCAA committees, the football committee will be looking at the effect of transfer rules, whether to strengthen continuing eligibility standards, and the time commitment required by football of student-athletes.
As for improving the diversity within the coaching pool, the committee will be looking to the AFCA for guidance regarding the establishment of a database of coaching candidates and to track the movement of minority coaches from the college to professional ranks. “Most of us in the game strongly feel we need to have more minorities as head coaches and assistant coaches,” Teaff says. “I personally feel we need to have more of our minorities interested in divisional football, which is Division I-AA, II, III, and the NAIA. There are many opportunities to coach [at those levels], but we just haven’t had that interest out of minorities coaches up to this point. So I think the committee can have a real impact in that area.”
The committee plans to meet again in May to review initial reports and may possibly develop a preliminary set of recommendations for further action. The committee also plans to meet in August as well as three more times in 2002.
“College football, in general, is felt by most entities to be in very good shape,” Teaff says. “We have made some significant improvement over the years—in the area of recruiting violations, graduation rates, and bringing in students of quality character who are academically capable. But with this new committee, the NCAA, and presidents who run large institutions looking critically at every aspect of the game, some positive changes are going to come out of it, and I look forward to that. Coaches are not nervous about this, we’re just glad that we’re a part of the process.”