Commission on College Basketball - Findings to be released Wednesday

[UrinalCake]

Remember that committee that was formed last fall after the FBI indictments were handed down? Condoleezza Rice is the chair and Grant Hill is on the committee. They have spent the past few months looking into college basketball (whatever that means) and are scheduled to release their recommendations on Wednesday morning. A live stream will be available through the NCAA via Twitter.

Does anybody want to offer any guesses/predictions as to what they're going to come up with? The level of snark already being thrown out by the general public regarding this committee is fairly high. College basketball is a broken system and the problems are not going to be fixed in six months by a committee. If anything, this seems like an effort to pass the buck onto somebody else so that the NCAA can say "we tried." Thoughts?

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[richardjackson199]

Not sure of the details, but I'm guessing they'll recommend NBA remove age requirement for going pro out of high school, to get the obvious OAD's targeted by shoe companies out of the NCAA landscape.

[UrinalCake]

Not sure of the details, but I'm guessing they'll recommend NBA remove age requirement for going pro out of high school, to get the obvious OAD's targeted by shoe companies out of the NCAA landscape.

That seems like a likely recommendation. I'm not sure it will really eliminate the shoe companies and/or agents, but at least it would take the extreme cases out of the equation.

I saw another tweet that one of the upcoming recommendations will be to reduce the live recruiting window for college coaches. If the committee actually thinks this will cause coaches to spend less time in contact with recruits, and therefore clean up the process of recruiting, then I may have actually overestimated how in touch they are with the system.

[cruxer]

Not sure of the details, but I'm guessing they'll recommend NBA remove age requirement for going pro out of high school, to get the obvious OAD's targeted by shoe companies out of the NCAA landscape.

This seems both likely and naive. MBB is a very valuable commodity and shoe companies pay the top universities millions of dollars. It's in their interest to see those universities stay at the top. The shoe companies will still be tempted to "encourage" the best athletes available to attend their beneficiary universities. The problem is the money in the sport and an inefficient economy that doesn't allow the natural allocation of that money. Anything that doesn't address either the money or the inefficient allocation is doomed to fail.

-c

[lotusland]

And of course the NBA created and maintains the OAD rule so I’m not sure how the committee’s recommendation matters. Coach K seems to want a Commish. Wonder if that is in the cards.

[JasonEvans]

I hope there are tons of recommendations about things we don't regularly talk about. Sure, it is easy to focus on OAD, but that is a problem that affects maybe 20 kids a year. There are 350+ D1 teams with 12 or so guys on each team meaning there are 4200 college basketball players at the D1 level. I truly hope this commission talks about issues that affect a much higher percentage of the players.

In addition to the relationship with the NCAA, I really hope the commission will address the following:

• Should players be paid something?
• Should practice time be reduced or altered?
• Are schools supporting the educational side of the student-athlete?
• Are the transfer rules fair?
• Are the scholarship rules fair?
• Is the LOI fair?
• Do we need to alter recruiting rules?
• Is there excessive travel?
• Should players share in merchandising profits?

That's just a list of stuff off the top of my head. The committee has had many months to look into this stuff. I expect them to be thorough and a lot smarter than I am.

-Jason "I think the committee seemed to have decent representatives of all sides of the game so I hope they will take everyone's perspective into consideration" Evans

[Owen Meany]

Given the composition of the commission, it seems that Coach K was heavily involved in its formation. Form this reason, I expect them to propose abolishing OAD (as a recommendation for the NBA), allowing coaches increased contact time with their players in and off season, and the creation of a basketball commissioner/czar. Coach K has talked about the need for this for many years and I can see him wanting to set the college game in order before passing it on to others just as he did with Team USA. I have always wondered if the commissioner position would be Coach K's eventual post-Duke position and was a concerned when the make up of the commission was announced. The departure of Jeff Capel lessened this concern since it seems to have increased the likelihood Coach K doesn't plan to leave in the very near future.

[sagegrouse]

Given the composition of the commission, it seems that Coach K was heavily involved in its formation. Form this reason, I expect them to propose abolishing OAD (as a recommendation for the NBA), allowing coaches increased contact time with their players in and off season, and the creation of a basketball commissioner/czar. Coach K has talked about the need for this for many years and I can see him wanting to set the college game in order before passing it on to others just as he did with Team USA. I have always wondered if the commissioner position would be Coach K's eventual post-Duke position and was a concerned when the make up of the commission was announced. The departure of Jeff Capel lessened this concern since it seems to have increased the likelihood Coach K doesn't plan to leave in the very near future.

• Commissioner for college hoops -- Bilas is the obvious choice, but Emmert and DBR will have a cow over it -- so maybe not
• Players allowed to have advisers -- even agents -- at any time in the process.
• Expanded and more legal role for equipment/shoe companies, but I haven't thought about the details
• Extensive loosening of financial compensation matters re players, families, agents and shoe companies. On second thought, this will be delayed until there is a commissioner, who can consider the details more carefully
• Smaller division I -- probably a super division I of about 150 teams (vs. 350)
• Regular season play among super div. I teams; NCAA tournament, however, open to everyone
• Expanded limits on hoops practice, both individually and as a team -- if best players are going after one year, there needs to be an earlier start to practice (July?); also maybe some sort of pre-season competition
• No request to the NBA and NBPA to change the rules re eligibility for the draft, 'cuz it just makes the college game look weak

[MCFinARL]

• Commissioner for college hoops -- Bilas is the obvious choice, but Emmert and DBR will have a cow over it -- so maybe not
  

Wow--I knew we were influential here at DBR, but maybe not that influential.

[chrishoke]

To whom would a Commissioner report?

[jv001]

To whom would a Commissioner report?

If it's Jay, he would only report to God. GoDuke!

[cato]

If it's Jay, he would only report to God. GoDuke!

Did Jay lose Coach K’s number?

[Bluedog]

In addition to the relationship with the NCAA, I really hope the commission will address the following:

• Should players be paid something?

Good list of questions, Jason.

Wanted to call out this one because I feel like nobody has given credit (or even acknowledges/is aware) of the recent changes that have been made. Even Coach K mentioned the recent changes to policy when asked about it during one of the pre-game NCAA press conferences saying (paraphrasing), "I don't know if you are aware [talking to the reporter], but there have been huge changes to what we can give our players over the last few years. And we give them significantly more. It's significant. Not small, but significant." (Yes, I recall him saying "significant" three times).

The most obvious change being the 2015 decision by the NCAA to allow the P5 conference schools to pay their athletes an additional stipend above their scholarship. Now, one could certainly argue semantics on if that's "paying the players" or not as it's technically just to cover all expenses beyond tuition+room&board, and is certainly not "market rate" for the top basketball athletes, but it is still money that they weren't receiving before. (The amounts ranged from $1,400 to $5,666 in 2015 with Boston College somehow being the lowest in BCS.) It's based on the cost of attendance formulas (used in federal financial aid calculations), which somehow for Alabama changed significantly the year they implemented it. Football players using the old cost of attendance were only going to get a $1600 stipend and instead ended up with $4000+ when the NCAA announced they were going to use that to determine how much to give athletes. Hmmmmm.

The stipend differences within conferences are stark, even for schools from the same state. Tennessee pays $5,666, Vanderbilt $2,780. California offers $3,552, Southern Cal $1,580 [...] The question is whether the cachet of the BCs, Notre Dames, and Georgia Techs will offset the thousands of dollars more that the Louisvilles, Florida States, and Clemsons can offer. Louisville pays $5,202, FSU $3,884, and Clemson $3,608 according to figures from the Chronicle of Higher Education. By contrast, Notre Dame pays $1,950, Georgia Tech $1,720, and BC $1,400, the lowest of the 65.

“Unfortunately, it’s not going to be a balanced playing field,” said Syracuse football coach Scott Shafer, whose school pays $1,632, the third-lowest among the Power 5. “There’s nothing we can do about that right now. You live in the now, you live with the reality of what is.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2...gKO/story.html
(Note that this article is from 2015, so those figures are NOT the latest and I assume they have gone up.)

[hallcity]

I'd suggest:
1) Require shoe companies to be certified by the NCAA and make it contractual so the NCAA could sue and use civil discovery if a company is suspected of improper behavior;
2) Require NCAA certification of AAU, summer basketball and HS all-star games and, again, make it contractual so there's a way to enforce the rules;
3) Reduce the number of all-star games that HS players can participate in;
4) Require NCAA certification of coaches and make it contractual so they're liable for monetary damages if they break the rules and so the NCAA could use civil discovery;
5) Reduce practice time;
6) Ask the NBA to draft players out of HS;
7) Allow schools to pay more transportation expenses for families of players -- it's now limited to the Final Four

I don't see a "czar" as a practical idea. I don't know what such a "czar" would even do. The NCAA is unlikely to allow players to be paid much or to share in merchandise money, at least not while they're students, because the non-P5 schools couldn't keep up.

[BigWayne]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned anything related to enforcement changes. The current methodology of regulation enforcement is at the root of many of the problems showing up above. Surely this commission would be looking at improving enforcement and compliance.

[sagegrouse]

To whom would a Commissioner report?

The Commissioner would report to a Board of Directors -- perhaps the NCAA board, perhaps a different one. Would Emmert and his successors be left out in the cold? I suspect Emmert's lack of involvement would be masked by various bureaucratic shenanigans.

[UrinalCake]

Paying the players is something that seems almost inevitable, just as it was for the Olympics many years ago. However, there are two different avenues for paying players and I think the distinction is important to make.

- In the first case you have the schools directly paying students in return for their play. I think this model would be extremely difficult to implement for a variety of reasons, and will never happen. The schools would become employers and subject to a host of legal ramifications. While many fans will causally suggest that paying players is an easy fix, in reality it is much more complicated.

- In the second case you have players being allowed to make money on their own - using their likeness, signing endorsement deals, etc. I think this should be on the table for discussion. The money isn't coming from the school, so nothing changes in that respect. The NCAA would simply be saying that if a player goes out and gets their own source of income, they do not forfeit their amateur status. This would allow more of a free market economy where players can go out and get whatever they're worth.

So I think the second scenario would be the appropriate first step. There are still questions to be answered, such as what happens when a school's booster says to a recruit "come to school X and I'll pay you a million dollars for a t-shirt with your name" or something like that. There would be all kinds of roundabout ways for schools to achieve the same end goal of paying the players via boosters or agents. But it's at least a starting point.

The other big issue that I think will be addressed is that of agents. K made comments last fall in which he foresaw a scenario where he might visit a high school recruit and the player is allowed to have an agent in the room to help advise him. Seems to make a lot of sense, and honestly the fact that players are not allowed to hire agents to help advise them either at the high school level or through the draft entry process has always struck me as asinine.

[Kfanarmy]

• Commissioner for college hoops -- Bilas is the obvious choice, but Emmert and DBR will have a cow over it -- so maybe not
• Players allowed to have advisers -- even agents -- at any time in the process.
• Expanded and more legal role for equipment/shoe companies, but I haven't thought about the details
• Extensive loosening of financial compensation matters re players, families, agents and shoe companies. On second thought, this will be delayed until there is a commissioner, who can consider the details more carefully
• Smaller division I -- probably a super division I of about 150 teams (vs. 350)
• Regular season play among super div. I teams; NCAA tournament, however, open to everyone
• Expanded limits on hoops practice, both individually and as a team -- if best players are going after one year, there needs to be an earlier start to practice (July?); also maybe some sort of pre-season competition
• No request to the NBA and NBPA to change the rules re eligibility for the draft, 'cuz it just makes the college game look weak

Only if one wants to have the players in/from the top 10 or so programs in the NCAA decide everything. Personally think he would be one of the worst possible choices...extremely well spoken, but logically broken.

[sagegrouse]

Only if one wants to have the players in/from the top 10 or so programs in the NCAA decide everything. Personally think he would be one of the worst possible choices...extremely well spoken, but logically broken.

See. It's just what I said. DBR is opposed to Bilas as Commissioner of Hoops -- he has no chance.

[Indoor66]

See. It's just what I said. DBR is opposed to Bilas as Commissioner of Hoops -- he has no chance.

I admire a sense of confidence and being articulate; I detest arrogance and self-certainty. Where does Bilas fit?