NCAA Mark Emmert.JPG

Change is coming for the NCAA and president Mark Emmert.

(Johnny Crawford/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/MCT)

What once were calls for change in the NCAA's structure and governance, now seems more like foreshadowing.

“NCAA reform is going to come first,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Tuesday. “But I think on the heels of that, re-defining core elements of the model will be the next thing on the agenda. This is the central issue in college athletics right now.”

Swarbick said this at the Bloomberg Sports Business Summit in New York, as reported by Bloomberg.com And it reflects what seems to be popular thinking now in college sports.

In July, NCAA President Mark Emmert told the Indianapolis Star that "one thing virtually everybody in Division I has in common right now, and that is they don't like the governance model." According to the Bloomberg report, Emmert is planning to convene a summit in January to discuss what these changes may be.

There is a fracture between the large BCS-conference schools and the smaller ones sharing the same plane and rules in Division-I. It has become seismic enough that the possibility of a separate division for these well-off schools seems likely.

To wit, take the plan to pay student-athletes a $2,000 stipend. The NCAA passed an action that would allow schools to give out this stipend. It was quickly negated by an override of voted on by Division-I school.

161 schools voted to override the stipend. Their composition explains why the NCAA is headed for a change. Only two BCS conference schools with football programs voted against the measure: Rutgers** and Wake Forest. Rutgers also voted against multi-year scholarships.

And Bloomberg reported that "Some schools are now saying it should be as high as $4,000."

“It’s a slippery slope,” American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said during the event. “You are getting into workers comp, lawyers, etc. I think the collegiate model has served the country very well. I don’t think we’d be a better country without women’s sports, Title IX, Olympic sports. A wide variety of students benefit from this.”

How this will be resolved is still unknown but it's likely that college sports will look much different in a decade.

** Rutgers' reasoning for voting against the stipend, called proposal 2011-96: