If anyone knows the issues within the NCAA, it’s Betsy Mitchell.
She was an athlete at one of college athletics’ richest juggernauts, Texas, has been a coach at Division I’s lowest tier and now is the athletic director of one of the NCAA’s smallest schools, Division III Caltech. She intimately understands the disparities between the NCAA’s 1,000 member schools. And she’s got a suggestion to fix it.
“The commercial priorities of some members means they need to go do their own thing,” says Mitchell. “I kind of wish they would.”
The rapid growth of a now-bloated Division I and surging revenues at the top of college sports have created an untenable situation: schools governing under the same umbrella despite striking disparities.
As a new gap splinters the haves and have-nots, college sports leaders are gearing up for the most transformative year in the industry since the late 1970s, a now 50-year-old fight barreling toward a figuratively “bloody” end, administrators say.
“Change is imminent,” says Ryan Cassidy, a former Rutgers football player who serves on several NCAA committees and has been integral in the latest transformation discussions. “This is going to be a rebirth.”
At this week’s 2022 NCAA convention in Indianapolis, just blocks away from the NCAA’s own headquarters, college leaders are poised to take the first step in the process of transforming how college athletics governs itself. A new, streamlined constitution—one that grants authority to each division to create its own policy—is expected to be approved Thursday in a vote of Division I, II and III members.
It sets the stage for a much more important step: the restructuring of Division I.
A microcosm of the NCAA, Division I is a fractured group of 350 schools, 32 conferences and three subsections—FBS, FCS and non-football-playing members—whose differing resources, missions and abilities have made it nearly impossible to regulate competitive equity. There is animosity and tension among them, mostly centered on how rules are made and how money is distributed and spent.
The conversation is largely driven by the FBS elite: the Power 5—the SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC and Big 12—and its commissioners, two of whom sit on the NCAA’s transformation committee, the group charged this spring with restructuring D-I. College sports’s richest leagues want to keep more revenue, spend more of that money in ways they currently cannot because of legislation and engineer their schools to participate and qualify in more championship events.
Many administrators fear oncoming threats from the rich and powerful, such as creating a fourth subdivision of schools and deregulating legislation that could further widen the gap in D-I, eliminating automatic qualifiers to championships and overhauling a revenue distribution model that keeps some smaller schools afloat.
“Everything is on the table,” says Tom McMillen, the president of Lead1, an association representing the FBS athletic directors.
“Division I is too large,” adds Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby. “There are more ways in which we are different than are ways that we are the same. There is an appetite [in the Power 5] for more control over our fate.”
And if it takes threats of secession?
“It was only through threats of taking our ball and going somewhere else that we got [legislative powers] last time,” Bowlsby adds. “You hate to do more saber-rattling, but we need change.”
This week, within an array of downtown hotels and convention spaces, administrators from various corners of Division I will argue from their own perspectives and for their own constituents in a showdown one Power 5 athletic director describes as a “blood fight.”
Will the little guys be left behind?
“You’re hoping for the best but expecting the worst,” says James Downer, athletic director at Saint Francis, an FCS school in Pennsylvania. “I don’t feel like I’m on a plane and it’s about to crash, but I do feel like I’m on a plane and I don’t know where it’s going to land.”