College basketball is in a crisis. Can the Rice Commission save the game?

College basketball has been here before, attempting to address the sport's problems. And yet, approaching the release of long-awaited recommendations from the latest commission charged with cleaning up a mess, there are more questions than answers:

Will things be any different now? Are there reasons to believe that real change is on its way?

“Well,” North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said, “I think the NCAA leadership has assured the folks on the commission that substantive changes will (happen), that their recommendations will be adopted by the membership. And I’m assuming that that will happen.”

The “commission” is the Commission on College Basketball – or, as it’s less formally known, the Rice Commission. Chaired by Condoleezza Rice, it has been charged with addressing problems surrounding college basketball, from an FBI investigation into corruption in recruiting to the effects of the NBA’s so-called “one-and-done” rule, which requires players to spend a season in college before entering the NBA draft.

The commission will release its long-awaited recommendations on Wednesday. No one knows exactly what to expect, though ACC Commissioner John Swofford said last week during a meeting with reporters in Greensboro that the recommendations will be “substantive.”

And, indeed, college athletics leaders have expressed urgency in addressing college basketball’s myriad problems since late last September, when news of the FBI investigation rocked the sport. At the time, 10 men were arrested – including four assistant coaches, an adidas executive and agents and financial advisers – amid a probe that detailed a black market bidding war for top high school prospects.

The allegations in the FBI investigation – that shoe companies and agents attempt to entice players or their families with payments against NCAA rules – had long been assumed. Quickly, the question became what to do about it.

The answer, for the past six months, has been the 14-member Rice Commission, which is comprised of a mix of leaders in higher education and those with first-hand college basketball experience, such as former Duke All-American Grant Hill and former Georgetown coach John Thompson III. In announcing the creation of the commission, Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, said that “this is not a time for half-measures or incremental change.”

He called for “decisive action,” and he charged the Rice Commission to “fully examine” the structure of Division I college basketball. Rice, the former provost of Stanford University and a former U.S. secretary of state, has had a distinguished career. Yet addressing and attempting to fix college basketball, and the NCAA, is a different kind of challenge, and one that no individual or committee has successfully met.

The commission’s work has gone on in private for the past six months. Details about its specific discussions, or impending recommendations, have been scant. What is known is that the commission was charged with three areas of focus:

▪ The relationship of the NCAA and its members, and their coaches and athletes, with outside entities, including apparel companies and agents.

▪ The NCAA’s relationship with the NBA, which has control over when college players are eligible to enter its draft.

▪ The relationship between schools and the NCAA’s national office, and whether “the appropriate degree of authority is vested in the current enforcement and eligibility processes.” That includes the question, according to the NCAA, of whether the current model “provides the investigative tools, cultural incentives and structures to ensure exploitation and corruption cannot hide in college sports.”

Given the commission’s wide-ranging responsibility, there’s no shortage of skepticism that the recommendations from Rice and her team will lead to significant change.

“I tend to manage my expectations, and I don’t think they’re going to get to a number of topics that she had hoped they would get to,” Debbie Yow, the N.C. State athletic director, said last week. “But I do think that their work will be important, and it will matter if they can simply offer a fresh model for summer recruiting. If they did nothing else, their time, as far as I’m concerned, would be valuable.”

In many ways, the world of college basketball recruiting, in which apparel companies Nike, adidas and Under Armour have long played a leading role, served as the impetus for the creation of the Rice Commission.

To Yow, and undoubtedly many others who’ve been around college sports long enough, the conversation about how to clean up college basketball recruiting is hardly a new one. She said she favors a model that would significantly reduce the influence of the shoe companies during the spring and summer recruiting periods. It’s an idea that has existed for at least 20 years, she said.

“I’m hoping to see that the NCAA ends up being in charge of summer recruiting,” Yow said, “and that the camps that the student-athletes attend will be managed in some form or fashion by the national organization.”

Yow has added motivation for such an idea to gain traction. N.C. State, after all, is now a part of the FBI’s expanded investigation, which alleged that a former N.C. State basketball coach, along with adidas, conspired to pay a former prospect’s father $40,000 to secure the player’s commitment to N.C. State.

Details in the FBI investigation make clear that the player in question is Dennis Smith Jr., who played for one season at N.C. State before entering the 2017 NBA draft. The Dallas Mavericks selected him with the ninth overall pick. During his high school years, Smith played on an adidas-sponsored AAU team coached by his father.

Undoubtedly, how the Rice Commission addresses the problems surrounding recruiting will be among the most-discussed recommendations. Another one of the most important questions facing the commission, though not necessarily central to any one of its three areas of focus, is the overall question of compensation for athletes.

Public opinion in recent years has shifted to the side of the athletes and the thought that they deserve more than a scholarship and meals in return for their contributions to a billion-dollar business. When Emmert spoke to reporters at the Final Four earlier this month, he addressed a question about the likelihood of adopting a so-called “Olympic model,” which would allow athletes to maintain their college eligibility while also accepting endorsement deals.

It’s one that Cunningham, the UNC athletic director, opposes. “I don’t believe it works in the college space,” he said, “because I don’t think there’s a real true market for a name, image and likeness for student-athletes. I think the recruiting in college athletics creates an artificial market, so I’m not a fan of that. That’s why I think that the borrowing against future earnings is a better solution than opening up the name, image and likeness.”

To Cunningham, the most critical questions in front of the Rice Commission are those about how college athletes can interact with agents and receive advice from them, what to do about the basketball recruiting scene and creating more viable professional paths for those not interested in attending college.

“I don’t see a magic wand or some type of a solution that in it of itself is going to lead us to a better situation,” he said. “I do think there’s a lot of opportunities created through sport, through basketball, and I think there’s a lot of good in college basketball. But the behavior that has been uncovered by the FBI, you know, gives you cause for concern.”

Former President Barack Obama, speaking recently at MIT, called for a more “well-structured” NBA minor league system, according to the website Reason.com, which posted Obama’s off-the-record comments. Obama said the NBA needs a more viable minor league, one that would be an attractive option for high school players, “so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure. … It's just not a sustainable way of doing business.”

Rice could not be reached through Stanford University, where she is a professor in the business school. In addition to fixing a troubled sport, her commission is also charged with addressing an overall NCAA enforcement structure that critics believe is inherently flawed, given that it allows schools to punish themselves – or not – depending on how they interpret how NCAA rules apply to a given circumstance.

Some have urged the commission to take up the issues raised by 18 years of suspect classes at UNC. Its accrediting agency found the classes to have lacked integrity. In October, the Knight Commission, a watchdog group that promotes reforms to strengthen the educational mission of college athletics, said it would seek to persuade Rice's commission to end what its leaders viewed as a loophole that allows member schools to decide whether academic fraud was committed in helping keep athletes eligible.

The Knight Commission also said the NCAA's bylaw for impermissible academic benefits needs to be reformed. Both bylaws came into play in the NCAA's case against UNC.

The Committee on Infractions determined it could not conclude UNC violated the academic fraud bylaw, because the university insisted roughly 180 classes that never met, had no instruction and were created and graded by a secretary were legitimate. The infractions committee also decided against a sanction of impermissible benefits, because non-athletes made up slightly more than half of the enrollments in the classes, which ran for more than a decade. Athletes, who make up less than 5 percent of the student body, accounted for the rest.

“When it was discovered that, at what we’ve always considered an academically admirable school, championships had been won by teams loaded with players who took completely phony classes, most of us were sincerely shocked,” Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, a former Indiana governor, wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion piece.

“We were stunned again when, after years of cogitation, the NCAA delivered a penalty of ... nothing. It was a final confession of futility, confirming the necessity of this special commission, if any meaningful change is going to happen from the collegiate end.”

Daniels expressed skepticism that meaningful change is on the way, regardless of the Rice Commission’s intent or recommendations.

Reporter Dan Kane contributed to this report.

This story was originally published April 24, 2018 at 10:07 AM with the headline "College basketball is in a crisis. Can the Rice Commission save the game?."