The NCAA’s Division I Transformation Committee, the entity created to chart the course for the future of Division I, is getting ready to submit its final set of governance reform recommendations to the DI Board of Directors, winding down after a year of weekly meetings. The Board of Directors will receive the recommendations and a full report from the group at its meeting on Jan. 12. Here’s what you need to know:
- Not everything will be decided by January, Transformation Committee co-chair Julie Cromer told The Athletic on Wednesday. “You’ll see a combination of recommendations for immediate action, concepts to be considered in the future and also basically a roadmap for a new governance structure,” Cromer said.
- SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who co-chairs the committee, reiterated on Wednesday the group’s commitment to “the big tent,” the idea that all of Division I can remain under one umbrella despite varying budgets and differences among schools. The key, he said, is to streamline the governance model and give people who should have it the ability to make changes.
- Cromer, the athletic director at Ohio University, said that the biggest change to the governance model will be the formation of sport management committees that would free all sports to govern themselves without needing approval from multiple layers of bureaucracy, a dynamic that slows down the current NCAA model.
Understanding the changes
The proposed sport management committees would serve similarly to how sport-specific oversight committees work now in football and men’s and women’s basketball. But there would be more of them, and they would have decision-making power.
“So many other sports don’t have oversight groups, and now they’ll have the opportunity for them to take a larger hand in shaping the future of their sports at the collegiate level — which I think is great,” Cromer said. “Whether it’s two years, three, four or five years, you’ll start to see different rules for different sports that make more sense specifically for them. They’ll be able to work more quickly and be more responsive to their sports. That’s a huge step forward, particularly with some of the other work we’ve done trying to help support the Olympic movement.”
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Other governance-specific recommendations will concern the composition of the DI Board of Directors and its role, as well as direct involvement from college athletes on various boards within the governance structure.
The Transformation Committee will also outline Division I membership expectations, which are essentially minimum requirements schools must meet for DI membership. Cromer said these requirements would be the most impactful recommendation to those working at the campus level. “We are talking about requiring access to mental health support,” she said, for example.
Paving the way for more restructuring
Other topics tied to broader decentralization and deregulation will carry over into 2023, even as the Transformation Committee disbands this December. Cromer expects the Transformation Committee will recommend that the board push topics such as changes to roster limits and/or scholarship caps through to the new governance structure and the new sport management committees.
“People assume that the bigger stuff has gone away, but that’s not necessarily the case,” Cromer said.
And then there is the question of the size of NCAA tournaments, in basketball and other sports.
Cromer said that the committee’s recommendations around Division I championship events will essentially be step one in a two-step process. If the Transformation Committee decides that each sport group should look at the feasibility of implementing a postseason that includes 25 percent of the teams that meet the Division I standard in the sport — a tournament size threshold that was floated earlier this fall — any changes would still need to be approved by the sport-specific committee. So, even if such a recommendation was made, the men’s basketball management committee could still opt to keep the NCAA Tournament at its current size.
(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
