The College Sports Forum

Insisting there is no crisis in intercollegiate athletics, NCAA President Myles Brand nonetheless cautioned Monday that the rate of budget growth for athletic departments needs to be moderated before expenditures become unsustainable.

Brand, speaking at the National Press Club, announced the recommendations of a 50-member presidential task force that was assigned almost two years ago to survey the future of Division I athletics.

The panel recommended presidents and chancellors of individual schools make decisions affecting fiscal behavior for their athletic departments, saying a mandate imposed by the NCAA would not work and the association cannot dictate such terms because of antitrust considerations.

Hundreds of millions are spent annually on scholarships, coaching salaries, facility upgrades and day-to-day operations of sports programs, causing many athletic departments to dip into their schools’ general funds to cover such costs, Brand said. And he warned that the schools’ academic missions could be increasingly pressured.

He said research shows athletic spending in Division I outpaced spending on higher education by two to three times in the last several years. The task force recommended that schools’ spending information be made available to university presidents and chancellors so trends can be tracked.

The big business of college athletics has become a hot button issue over the past few weeks.  The athletic department budgets are not the only thing being evaluated; the NCAA was recently questioned about its tax exemption.  It will be interesting to see how the NCAA handles these two situations, but I don’t think the juggernaut of NCAA athletics can’t be stopped.