By Staff
Coaching Management, 9.5, August 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0905/bbexempt.htm
In a victory for coaches, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors has deferred decision on legislation that would have eliminated exempt contests and established a 29-game cap on the regular season schedule. The legislation had recently been approved by the Division I Management Council.
Teams are currently allowed to schedule 28 contests, which can include one certified exempt contest. Certified events count as only one contest against the 28-contest limit and are usually November and December tournaments offering teams the chance to play two or more games in one trip. The proposed rule would have forced teams to count each game played during those tournaments.
Coaches complained loudly that eliminating the exemption for the certified events would hurt college basketball by limiting the opportunities for mid- and lower-level Division I teams to meet the top teams at neutral sites and would reduce the number of early season match ups between top programs. But supporters of the change pointed to the benefits of standardizing schedule lengths and emphasized that teams would have been free to play in the certified events as long as they held to the new 29-contest limit.
Facing such a divergent range of opinions, the Board of Directors elected to put the new measures on hold while conducting a study of the issues surrounding exempted contests. They’ve also placed a moratorium on certifying any new exempt tournaments. The study, which is to be completed by January 2004, will look at the following areas:
• missed class time and other academic impacts;
• competitive equity based on the number of contests and television exposure;
• the costs incurred by schools competing in these events;
• certification requirements, including a possible cap on the number of teams or contests per event;
• the impact of certified events on the selection process for the Division I Men’s Championship.
“The Board still has an interest in setting a finite limit on the number of contests for basketball, but we also have concerns about the legislation as it came to us,” said William E. Kirwan, President of Ohio State University and Chair of the Board, in an NCAA press release. “Having said that, the moratorium will give us time to study the broad ramifications of certified events, including whether they will address the issues of competitive equity and student-athlete welfare.”