Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008

Clemson president leads call for reform

Clemson president James Barker recently completed the first year of a two-year term as the chairman for the NCAA’s board of directors.

Barker recently sent a letter to fellow ACC school presidents outlining what he believes are major issues the NCAA must continue addressing in the near future: academic reform, the commercialization of college athletics and early enrollment by athletes.

He recently sat with The State’s Clemson beat reporter, Paul Strelow, to discuss these topics as well as others, including his relationship with football coach Tommy Bowden.

QUESTION: Will this be Tommy Bowden’s breakthrough season?

ANSWER: All signs point to that. One of my jobs is managing unrealistic expectations. I’m cautiously optimistic.

I do think the reason we ultimately decided to extend his contract was we looked at all the things outside not winning a conference championship — the quality of players we’re getting here, their graduation rates, the kind of citizens they are, and then how recruiting had been going — all that said we had this ship going in the right direction.

Now what we needed was just to win a couple more key games. You want to invest in coaches and staffs that have built that, and to do otherwise we really felt would be, not starting over, but to a great extent rebuilding that foundation that had already been built here.

Q: There always has been a perception that Bowden is not one of your “guys.” The conflict with the academic review board went public, and he was nearly allowed to go to Arkansas before some powerful influences intervened at the last minute. Describe your relationship with him.

A: It’s extremely positive. He’s done a wonderful job at Clemson. He has become a member of the Clemson family. Both his son and daughter have graduated from Clemson. He’s a great ambassador for us.

No, I’m very supportive of him. I’m not sure why it would seem otherwise.

Q: In light of DeAndre McDaniel’s pending assault and battery charge, the athletic department’s discipline policy has come under scrutiny lately. Your thoughts?

A: There will never be a perfect student body or student-athlete corps, but the way our student-athletes have behaved is something I’m proud of.

We’re in the business to educate, and if there are disciplinary measures that need to be done, we do that. Within our internal review outside our athletic department, I put a great deal of stock in the judgments they reach.

I think our system is a good. Terry Don Phillips is exactly right. There are several of us involved in it. If I’m not happy with it, I can change it. And if I feel like I should, I will.

So if you want to criticize Clemson’s system, look at the few number of problems we’ve had. It must be working.

Q: What is your proudest accomplishment as chair thus far?

A: Academic reform. There were a couple of times it could have gotten off track. There were coaches who were speaking very loudly and very persuasively why this whole thing was a joke. You find one case study of a problem and you say, well, the whole system’s broke. It would have been easy to say, well, maybe we ought to rethink this. But no, this is too important.

Academic reform is the biggest issue we’re dealing with. It appears that once a generation, the NCAA goes through an examination and reflection and comes to a conclusion we’re not doing enough on academic matters and pushes through some major legislation that would do that.

We’ve certainly done that with APR, and what’s coming next is big-time penalties.

We’ve been talking about the APR scores and sanctions following the coaches when they go from one school to another. When they go to another school, the only people who suffer are the ones left behind.

We’re trying to find the right way which those APR scores and sanctions can follow a coach as they move from one place to another.

Q: More than two-thirds of the teams that fell under the designated APR cutoff line were not penalized. Is the current process really stringent enough?

A: What troubled me was you could have the impression that schools that had the resources were the ones that were given the benefit of the doubt in that regard. We’ve had some discussions about that.

What the NCAA is saying they’re doing, and I think there’s some truth here, is they’re trying to change behavior. Punishment is one way to change behavior, and ultimately it would be that way for every school. That’s why we’re putting in this appeals process because some people are really going to get hit pretty hard, it looks like, especially in basketball. The process is working because scores are going up in every other sport but basketball, which is a major step in the right direction.

We didn’t have a problem here, but it didn’t feel right to me that schools like Clemson which had the resources would have been in the set that were exempted, and schools that had fewer resources weren’t. But, ultimately, it may mean a realignment of schools that play Division I. That could be the price of admission.

Q: Where specifically is commercialization damaging college sports?

A: There’s been a recent federal ruling that it’s against several existing federal laws for businesses not to be able to put players in fantasy games and make them as real as possible. Another thing would be video games with various people’s names and numbers on them. Right now it’s just likenesses.

We’re just trying to protect the student-athlete, because then the NCAA would be accused of selling out for money when, in fact, we’re trying to prevent that from happening. Student-athletes don’t need to worry about their likenesses being used in gaming.

Then we have to keep our own house in order as to how much commercialization we’re pushing ourselves, all the way from commercials at games to sponsorships. There’s always been some element of commercialization in college sports, but there’s now a line we’re trying to define with a task force. We’re trying to avoid taking the pro sports model when all these other market forces are pulling us in the other direction.

Q: Does it not feed into the commercialization image that the major programs want to keep the BCS instead of incorporating a playoff system because the BCS has provided a hefty pay day for all involved?

A: I don’t know if there is a moral high ground on that issue. You could make the argument the BCS system is about splitting money from bowl games, and I’ve heard an awful lot of people try to justify a playoff system by saying there would be more money involved.

The BCS, in my mind, is about bowl games and people — and Clemson is the best or the worst here, however you want to look at it — planning their vacations and holidays around these trips and enjoying the experience.

It seems to me what’s happening with the current system is if there’s a fixed amount of money and you could use one system versus the other, then the playoff system would concentrate it in fewer people’s hands.

There was a pretty heated meeting (in January) about the current system versus a playoff system, and I didn’t see in that meeting any indication that we were moving toward a playoff system from the board of directors’ standpoint.

Q: Why are university presidents by and large against a playoff?

A: First of all, this is a very diverse group of people, so it’s hard for me to speak for them.

When (Georgia) president (Michael) Adams had this notion it should be discussed, my attitude was, absolutely. And I think we need to continue to have that attitude. If every year there are 50 new university presidents, we need to keep having the discussion and see how they look at it.

Q: Your baseball coach, Jack Leggett, was outspoken against relatively new NCAA legislation that manages baseball scholarships. You were a proponent. Did that spawn some interesting discussions?

A: It did. ... On the whole, though, the sum of what’s being done is a very positive thing for baseball.

Jack, as he should, was saying this may not be a very positive thing for Clemson. And I tried to look at it from that standpoint, too. But I think the academic reform in baseball was needed.

We were underperforming as a sport. Very bright people play baseball, yet they are graduating at such a poor rate. If this isn’t successful, we may have to look at number of games played, because that might be the root of all of it.

Q: Five years after ACC expansion, has it helped or hurt Clemson?

A: I think it’s been a very successful thing for the conference, and this is how I measure it. First and foremost, we have aligned ourselves with some great institutions. You may be surprised that, until a school passed that academic test, we didn’t consider them.

I think what’s going to happen is Miami gets stronger in terms of football again and Florida State kicks it up another notch where they were. Boston College is already there, and heaven knows Virginia Tech is. We’re going to be as strong a conference in football as we are in basketball, and that ultimately is part of what we were after.

Financially, we didn’t take a loss, but it was not a windfall, and we knew that. We knew we were going to try to hold our own the first few years, and that’s what we’ve done.

Q: You mentioned to the ACC presidents that early enrollment by freshmen is an issue.

A: I can think of a lot of good things happening on our campus in terms of football players coming in a semester early because it gets them acclimated. But we haven’t done a thorough analysis, really, on whether that’s a good idea academically, socially, athletically.

On the surface it looks good, and I hope it will be, but we need to do some homework to see if there’s any kind of growing information about whether that’s a good idea or under what circumstances it is.

Q: You recently spoke to campus administrators about the virtues of solar energy. How do you see this parlaying into the athletic arena?

A: We have an emphasis area academically in sustainable environment, so we’ve got to practice what we preach.

We took a look at Death Valley through the eyes of one of our architecture students. This student said that Death Valley is a solar bowl. All of the south-facing stands are perfect for collecting solar energy. So he designed this system for them to be collectors. The seat folds down when not in use and is a solar cell. It’s not cost effective yet, but we’re working on it, and it shows what universities ought to be doing in terms of using creativity and innovation to solve problems.