Winds of Change?

The NCAA Division I presidents have clearly had enough of the cheating, lack of accountability and low academic expectations that have long-plagued college athletics. The result could be the most sweeping fundamental change to college sports in decades.

After finishing a two-day summit in Indianapolis this week, Penn State University President Graham Spanier reported that many have "reached a boiling point" and that change would be swift. "I think you'll see some pretty remarkable things in the coming months," warned NCAA President Mark Emmert.

As quickly as the NCAA summit ended, its Division I Board of Directors endorsed, without dissension, a plan that would require college sports teams to carry a four-year average of 930 on the Academic Progress Rate or be banned from post-season competition. That standard roughly equates to a 50-percent graduation rate.

Wrote Diamond Leung of ESPN.com:

Most eye-opening is the fact that Connecticut, after a storybook run to the national championship, would not be able to defend its [men's basketball] title. The Huskies would have barely qualified for the tournament with an APR score of 930 and then would have be barred from postseason play in the 2011-12 season because in May, it was announced their four-year average through the 2009-10 academic year had fallen to 893.

Twelve of the teams in the 2010-11 tournament — including Ohio State, Kansas State, Purdue and Syracuse — would not have been eligible under the new requirements.

How this might impact track & field is hard to determine as the NCAA Championships serve both teams and individuals with the individual performance counting toward a team point total. Would a single competitor — even carrying a 3.9 GPA in physics — be barred if his team's APR was below the required limit? That answer will have to wait.

But the storyline remains, according to Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports, "These guys mean business ... The presidents potentially did more in the last two days than their predecessors did in the last 60 years."

"Many experts were skeptical that the NCAA would ever move to deal with the problem of low graduation rates among a small minority of tournament teams," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a former Academic All-American basketball player at Harvard. "But they were wrong. College presidents have acted courageously and are leading the way."

Of course, nothing has been turned into a rule or regulation yet, but Emmert promised details to be finalized by October.