By Libby Sander

Washington

In the midst of a tumultuous period for big-time college sports, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has come forth with a battery of recommendations that it says would restore balance to an enterprise that spends beyond its means and has created an enormous gap between academics and athletics.

The recommendations include a call for increased openness in athletics departments' financial reporting, specifically in the areas of debt service and capital expenses, and a proposal that would modify revenue-distribution models at the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Bowl Championship Series to award monies based, in part, on the academic success of athletes.

The 20-page report, "Restoring the Balance," which the commission released Thursday afternoon during a news conference here, comes as many of the nation's biggest athletics departments are catching their breath after several weeks of shifting—some real, some imagined—in the conference landscape. The report's recommendations do not address conference realignment, focusing instead on many of the financial underpinnings that commission members said contributed to unsustainable budgetary pressures.

"We didn't get into this extraordinary fiscal imbalance overnight, and we're not going to get out of it tomorrow," said William E. "Brit" Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and co-chair of the commission. "But we feel that we are starting down the path that we hope will bring the right kind of balance to expenditures on athletics and academics."

The commission's 22 members were inspired to draft the proposals, in part, by what Mr. Kirwan called "startling data": From 2005 to 2008, median spending on athletics at most of the public institutions in Division I-A jumped 38 percent, to $84,446 per athlete. Academic spending per student during that same period, in the meantime, grew by 21 percent, to $13,349.

With those and other statistics in mind, the commission laid out several recommendations designed, members said, to bring spending on college sports more in line with the "educational values" of universities. Among the recommendations:

• Fine-tune the NCAA's financial reporting mechanisms to include information on long-term debt service and spending on capital projects.
• Strengthen the level of oversight that university trustees give to their institutions' athletics programs, particularly when it comes to budgetary matters.
• Reduce the length of sports seasons and reduce or eliminate nontraditional seasons.
• Refrain from using athletes' images and likenesses to promote commercial products.
• Limit the number of noncoaching staff members linked to a team who do not directly deal with either the academic or the health concerns of athletes.
• Reduce the number of football scholarships at Division I-A programs by eight or 10 per team to cut back on costs.

Len Elmore, a former college and professional athlete, lawyer, and commission member who is the new chief executive of iHoops, the NCAA's youth-basketball program, said the report aimed to emphasize the "bright line" between college and professional sports. "We're not saying there cannot be an investment in sports," Mr. Elmore said. "We're saying that investment must be put in perspective."

New Incentives

One of the proposals the commission deemed vitally important—but could be most difficult to implement—was a recommendation to change the way the NCAA and the Bowl Championship Series distribute millions of dollars in basketball and football revenue each year to the nation's largest and most successful athletics programs.

The proposed change calls for the BCS, for instance, to allocate to each of the major conferences 20 percent of the overall funds available for payouts and designate it as an Academic-Athletics Balance Fund. The conferences would then distribute that money to their member institutions based on certain academic criteria for teams.

"The NCAA and all of our institutions frequently speak about the importance of academics as an integral part of intercollegiate athletic programs," Mr. Kirwan said. "When you really look at what's being proposed here, we're just saying, 'Let's live by that principle.' If we're going to generate more revenue, let's make certain that a significant fraction of that revenue is dedicated to rewarding high academic performance."

Another proposal took aim at the academic-progress rate, a cornerstone of the NCAA's academic standards for athletes. The recommendation states that a program can only participate in postseason competition if it has an academic-progress rate of 925, which equates to roughly a 50-percent graduation rate. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has spoken out against having academically unprepared teams compete in the postseason, said Thursday in a written statement that he supported the commission's recommendation. But he urged the NCAA to strengthen its use of the academic-progress rate "to protect the interests of student athletes and the integrity of their parent institutions in a more rigorous and timely fashion."

Mr. Kirwan, too, said the current model for the academic-progress rate has too much of a lag time before the NCAA imposes penalties on teams, if it imposes any penalties at all. The disincentives should be more immediate for programs with athletes who perform poorly in the classroom, he said.

"We think this is a much stronger statement about the importance of academics and the importance of the institutional commitment to strong academics," he said.

The NCAA, which has maintained that the purpose of the academic-progress rate is not to punish underperforming teams but to encourage them to do better, disagreed with the Knight Commission's portrayal of the academic-progress rate: "As simple as it sounds, we don't think establishing a specific postseason penalty trigger ... for all teams is fair—especially to those teams that are improving," said the association's interim president, James L. Isch, in a written statement.

Members of the commission will appear before the NCAA's Division I Board of Directors in August to discuss the proposals, he said. Given the broad impact that many of the proposals would have if adopted, Mr. Isch said it was unlikely the board would unilaterally decide to act on any of the measures. (The NCAA's new president, Mark Emmert, does not take over until November.)

College presidents who sit on the Knight Commission, Mr. Isch said, are free to sponsor legislation through their respective conferences to begin "vetting" the commission's recommendations.