NCAA Considers New Standards

Officials in the National Collegiate Athletic Association are considering a series of tougher academic standards for incoming athletes.

The new standards were proposed Thursday by the Management Council of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors.

Management Council member Jack Evans said the only approved change is the increase in core high school courses required for athletes entering college.

The proposed reforms still on the NCAA's agenda include an alteration to the sliding scale used to admit athletes, a thorough review of athletes' progress toward graduation and penalizing teams for poor academic performance.

"The motivation behind (the proposed changes) is to take steps to improve graduation rates," Evans said. "But the logic is that if kids are better prepared at the start, the more likely they are to be successful in their freshman year and succeeding years."

But Evans said the future of the proposed changes remains in limbo. "Once (changes) are proposed, there is not a precise flowchart," Evans said. "But depending on the topic of the proposal, it might go to one of the legislative councils for comment."

Evans said the NCAA's Board of Directors has the final say in whether the changes will be adopted.

Lisa Deibler, UNC-Chapel Hill director of compliance, said higher admission standards for athletes would have little effect on UNC-CH athletic programs because the University's standards are already highly demanding.

Deibler said the UNC-system Board of Governors regulates standards more strictly than the NCAA does. "We like to think of ourselves as more of an academic conference, like the Big Ten," she said. "This won't do a lot of damage."

But Deibler said the proposal might create problems for some universities. "I'm sure there would be (universities with issues), but I wouldn't want to name them," she said.

Evans said that the debate over collegiate athletics has been raging for close to 20 years and that it is still difficult to project how changes will affect individual universities' athletic programs. "The topic is almost perpetually on the agenda," Evans said. "But I have no idea how (the proposal) might affect different institutions."

Bill Friday, a former UNC-system president and an active proponent of reforming college athletics, said that the NCAA's increased standards for athletes are a step in the right direction. "If I were the president of an institution graduating 25 percent (of athletes), I'd be embarrassed," Friday said. "To ignore them or let them leave without any preparation would be a sharp criticism of that institution."

Friday said institutions are obligated to promote the academic success of student athletes.

"We're not running professional teams," he said. "We have a moral duty to help them make a career.

"All of these efforts (of the NCAA) are done in acknowledgement of a very important statistic -- fewer than one in 100 make a career out of a college sport."

NCAA officials acknowledge that there is a long way to go in improving athletes' performance in the classroom.

"We need to give schools incentives to recruit students who can do the work and disincentives to schools with students who can't complete the work," Evans said. "But the details remain to be worked out."

The State & National Editor can be reached at stntdesk@unc.edu.