One of the NCAA’s most persistent challenges is monitoring the movements of sports agents who use cash, gifts, and other perks to curry favor with talented college athletes. Agents, after all, operate beyond the purview of NCAA bylaws, answering instead to state and federal laws that regulate their behavior.

On Thursday the NCAA is slated to hold a summit here in Washington to discuss this gap. Among the participants is a representative from the Arkansas attorney general’s office. This year, the Arkansas legislature made major changes in an existing state law that governed agents’ interactions with college athletes. (Forty or so states have similar laws, known collectively as the Uniform Athletes Agent Act.)

Under Arkansas’s tougher new law, the Athlete Agent Reform Act of 2011, sports agents who provide false or misleading information to athletes to persuade them to sign a…

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The University of Maryland boasts one of the biggest athletic programs in the Atlantic Coast Conference, with 27 sports. But that robust roster may be endangered: a university commission charged with examining the athletic department’s budget shortfalls has reached a “painful conclusion” that the Terps need to eliminate eight teams—men’s cross country, indoor and outdoor track, tennis, and swimming and diving; and women’s tennis, water polo, and acrobatics and tumbling—to pare back expenses.

Those cuts could trim $3.5- to $5-million from the $57-million athletic budget. But if no changes are made, according to a report the group released Monday night, the department could face operating deficits of $8.7-million by 2013.

Maryland’s fiscal woes stem from increased scholarship costs and overhead expenses, coupled with several straight years of declining revenues in football and…

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The child sex-abuse scandal that has roiled Penn State this week is a wake-up call on the dangers of outsized reverence for sports programs, and could trigger NCAA sanctions for unethical conduct, Mark Emmert, the association’s president, told The Chronicle in an interview on Thursday.

If an NCAA investigation does result in penalties for the university, it would be a first for Penn State: The Nittany Lions are one of only four Division I programs that have never faced a major NCAA rules violation.

Emmert called the situation “utterly deplorable.” He said he was stunned by both the sobering criminal allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach accused of abusing at least eight young boys, and the swiftness of the university’s Board of Trustees in firing Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno—two men whom Emmert characterized as among the most…

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That’s what USA Today asks in a timely and insightful piece about the network’s increasingly powerful role in shaping the commercial—and now, perhaps, even the geographic—landscape of college sports.

“For all that ESPN has lent to the growth of major-college athletics—through on-air exposure and with rights-fees payouts that schools have fed into stadium improvements, luxurious locker rooms and huge contracts for top coaches—there’s an undercurrent of concern about the influence of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports,” write Steve Wieberg and Steve Berkowitz. “It’s not just that its tentacles are everywhere: They’re everywhere at once.”

ESPN, of course, holds the television rights to most of college sports’ biggest names. Along with its sister network, ABC, ESPN retains at least some of the football and basketball rights for most Division I conferences, as well a…

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Washington—Federal lawmakers leveled their sights on the ills of big-time college sports on Tuesday, with one congressman likening the NCAA to the Mafia and vowing greater scrutiny of the enterprise.

“It is incumbent upon us to try to do all that we can to remedy the many problems that exist,” said Rep. Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, speaking at a panel discussion he convened to examine the impact of scandals on college sports. Shady recruiting practices and unrest over whether to pay college athletes, for starters, have contributed to the frustration, he said.

“This is a problem that will not go away until we shine a light on it, or unless we do something about it in a major way,” he said.

His concerns come less than two weeks after Rep. John Conyers Jr., of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to that committee’s…

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College athletes will soon be able to receive heftier—and lengthier—athletic scholarships under several new policies the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors approved Thursday.

The board took swift action on a wide-ranging agenda at its fall meeting in Indianapolis: In addition to approving the changes to athletic scholarships, board members also adopted stricter academic standards for freshman athletes and those who transfer in from two-year colleges, and settled on a timeline for implementing a new policy that requires Division I teams to meet an academic cutoff before taking part in postseaon play.

NCAA president Mark Emmert said the policy changes would put “real meat” behind a sweeping agenda that emerged in August following a summit of college presidents. “It was, in short, one of the most aggressive and fullest agendas the Division I board has ever faced,” Emmert said…

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If the NCAA wants to solve the deep-seated problems that plague college sports, it’s going to have to do more than adopt a series of proposals that make only technical adjustments. So states a letter that nine leading athletic administrators sent to the NCAA’s president, Mark Emmert, in advance of today’s Division I Board of Directors meeting, where officials are considering a spate of proposals aimed at overhauling several key policies in big-time sports.

The letter, which was first reported by USA Today, says the proposed reforms—which emerged from a presidential retreat in August, and have been fast-tracked through the NCAA’s often-sluggish legislative channels—offer inadequate solutions to broader problems in college sports.

“We remain strongly concerned that the goals, process, and timetables of this work simply will not consider or produce the type of ‘systemic’ change…

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Washington—Athletic programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision spent on athletes at a rate that far outpaced academic spending per student during a recent five-year period, according to new research reported by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Spending per athlete grew by 50 percent in the FBS during the five-year period, while academic spending per student increased by 22 percent, according to the report, which was produced by the Delta Cost Project and is slated for release on Monday morning at the commission’s meeting here.

See the PDF for full resolution: The blue line represents athletics spending per athlete.

The pattern was similar among programs in the Football Championship Subdivision, which—as we reported back in June—saw spending on athletics grow at nearly…

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Grapevine, Tex.—NCAA President Mark Emmert delivered a stern lecture Monday afternoon to athletic directors from the country’s biggest college sports programs, taking them to task for the tumult of recent conference realignment and urging them to take part in the association’s current efforts to overhaul some of its policies.

“People today have greater doubt, greater concern about what we stand for and why we do what we do,” Emmert said to a packed room of athletic directors and faculty athletics representatives, who have all gathered here for their annual meetings. “And that is a huge problem for us.”

“The specter of the past couple weeks of conference realignment has not been a healthy thing,” said Emmert, speaking forcefully and without notes. The prevailing belief among the public and the press, he said, is that college sports stands only for money. But he scolded the ADs for…

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Grapevine, Tex.—A majority of faculty-athletics representatives at the nation’s biggest college sports programs say they believe athletes cluster in certain academic majors because of scheduling issues, and because of the NCAA’s progress-toward-degree requirements, according to the preliminary results of a forthcoming NCAA survey.

“That clearly is a concern,” said Michael Miranda, the NCAA’s associate director of research, who presented the early findings to faculty-athletics representatives from Football Bowl Subdivision programs gathered here for their annual meeting. “If people’s behaviors are being influenced by the rules that we’re writing … we have to look at them. We’re intrigued by that one, and we’ll take a closer look at that.”

The preliminary report is distilled from a broader NCAA survey of all faculty-athletics representatives, and included…

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