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Big title, little power for Brand

Some people remember Myles Brand for firing Bob Knight at Indiana.

I also remember him accepting a game ball from Knight’s successor, Mike Davis, during the Hoosiers’ NCAA tournament run last March, and grinning like a freshman who had just hit a winning shot at the buzzer. That’s why I hesitate to herald Brand’s hiring as NCAA president as a new day in college sports, as NCAA search committee chairman Robert Lawless did last week.

“This selection marks the beginning of a new era,” said Lawless, president of the University of Tulsa.

True, Brand is the first university president to hold a job that always has belonged to a member of the great American jockocracy. But Brand long has been a friend, not to say a promoter, of big-time athletics.

Personable, well-spoken and loaded with academic credentials, Brand is a fine front man for the NCAA’s effort to make an increasingly skeptical public believe college sports is more about college than sports.

The real bottom line at the NCAA always will have a dollar sign attached. Don’t expect that to change under Brand.

“If you believe that think Myles Brand is going to reform the NCAA, I have some dot-com stock that I’d like to interest you in,” said Indiana professor Murray Sperber, who has written several books on big-time athletics.

Brand seemed to stand on the side of reform when he spoke to the National Press Club last year. In an oft-quoted speech, Brand said he didn’t want to eliminate big-time sports.

“I just want to lower the volume,” he said.

But word apparently never made it back to Brand’s own campus in Bloomington. Officials there are scheming to fund a $40 million athletics-facilities campaign aimed at improving the Hoosiers’ chances to compete for conference and national titles in all sports.

That’s not lowering the volume.

Indiana last year fired a respected alumnus, Cam Cameron, whose football team had finished 4-4 in the Big Ten, and replaced him with Gerry DiNardo, whose contract is among the richest in conference history.

Brand did lower the volume–and the boom–on Knight. But for much of Brand’s Indiana tenure he has been viewed widely as a puppet who, like his predecessors, had no interest in disciplining the Hoosiers’ basketball coach or making him accountable for his actions in any way.

When video cameras appeared to catch Knight choking former Hoosiers basketball player Neil Reed in practice, Brand could have dismissed the coach. Instead he imposed a “zero-tolerance” behavior policy and hoped the Knight problem would go away. It wasn’t until the following autumn, when Knight stepped outside his fiefdom and grabbed a student, that Brand chose to act.

To his credit, Brand stood fast in the face of death threats, not to mention Indiana guard Dane Fife’s transfer threats. Neither turned out to be real.

Brand’s colleagues, who typically don’t receive that much network face time in a lifetime, were impressed with his aplomb under fire.

Some presidents might even believe if Brand could tame the monster on his own campus, he could joust with the larger monster threatening to devour campuses across the country.

But Brand has little power in an organization literally fractured by divisions–Divisions I, II and III. He can’t veto legislation. He doesn’t set budgets.

Brand’s influence will come through persuasion. His job is to set agendas, and also to rebut the NCAA’s growing number of critics.

For example, the first time a TV talk show wants to hammer the NCAA for having so few black head football coaches, Brand can go in front of the camera and point out that he hired Davis, the first black head coach of any sport in Indiana history.

Brand has yet to outline an agenda. Wisely, he says he will spend the first months on the job listening.

He no doubt will hear from people urging him to support a playoff in Division I-A football. Brand may listen, but he is unlikely to betray his Big Ten pals and champion a system that would share largesse with the Marshalls and the Louisvilles.

Don’t underestimate Brand’s roots in the Big Ten, one of the fattest hogs at the Bowl Championship Series trough. The league represents the best and worst of the major-college sports industry. In recent years it has been embarrassed by scandals at Minnesota, Michigan, Northwestern and Wisconsin. It also has had dazzling success on the field, with 13 national titles since 1999.

It’s possible Brand will distance himself from the big-time sports culture when he moves 50 or so miles north to his new office in Indianapolis. He may become an advocate for reform. And real reform may occur on his watch.

But if the NCAA really wanted Brand to clean up college sports, it would give him a steam shovel, or perhaps a flame thrower. Instead, it’s giving him a microphone.