Steve Berkowitz

USA TODAY Sports

DALLAS — The NCAA is surveying its Division I membership about potential changes to the composition of the committee that selects teams for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

The prospect of such changes – as well as a proposed change in how the NCAA distributes tournament revenues to Division I members – is alarming some athletics directors and conference commissioners within the Football Championship Subdivision and the segment of Division I schools that do not have football teams.

A group of those officials met here Monday at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics annual convention to discuss these and other governance issues as Division I embarks upon a series of summer discussions that could set the tone for a rules-making cycle that culminates at the 2017 NCAA convention and the NCAA Division I Council meeting in April 2017.

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The convention is where rules-making is done by schools and athlete representatives from the five wealthiest conferences – the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern – which were given the autonomy about two years ago to make changes that can apply to all Division I members. The Council is a group that votes on legislation that does apply to all Division I members

The influential Collegiate Commissioners Association will be meeting next week. Later in June, many Division I committees, as well as the Council, will be gathering.

The Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee has asked Division I members to respond to a survey concerning possible changes to the composition of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, according to a presentation Monday by Hofstra athletics director Jeff Hathaway, a member of the oversight committee. The survey includes the notion of expanding the selection committee, which determines the men’s basketball tournament field, from its current 10 members to either 11 or 12 and/or giving permanent seats on the committee to one representative from each of the Power Five conferences.

It’s also possible that composition of the committee will be based on representation from five regions of the country rather than the current four.

At present, according to NCAA director of media coordination and statistics David Worlock, the committee’s composition criteria involve there being six members from the Football Bowl Subdivision – which has 10 conferences – and four members from the FCS or non-football-playing conferences. In addition, there must be at least one – but not more than three – representatives from each of the four regions: East, South, Midwest and West. (If a fifth region is created, it would be called the Southeast region.)

Another membership survey has come from a working group of school officials that has been discussing the manner in which the NCAA annually distributes revenue to Division I schools – especially the incremental additional money the NCAA will be distributing from future scheduled increases in TV rights fees.

Distributions will still be substantially driven by schools’ performance in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. But under one plan about which the membership is currently being surveyed, schools’ shares of money from future increases could be driven by their Academic Performance Rate (APR) figures, their Graduation Success Rate (GSR) figures and a comparison of athletes’ Federal graduation rate figures to those of all students.

These two surveys have aroused concerns among FCS and non-football-playing schools, which were wary about the potential impact of giving the Power Five conferences certain rules-making autonomy.

“When we talked about the autonomy governance system, there were general assurances we were given – and some of it’s actually codified in the (NCAA) constitution – that the basketball system will be left alone and the revenue distribution system will be left alone,” Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Commissioner Rich Ensor told USA TODAY Sports after Monday’s meeting.

“Yet, here we are 18 months into the new governance process and we have a survey asking us to look at the composition of the men’s basketball committee and a survey telling us we have a new revenue distribution amount (and) do we go into a required academic distribution.”

The Men’s Basketball Committee’s composition is a touchy issue, both from a geographic perspective and a classification perspective. It affects perceptions about which schools get picked for the 36 at-large spots in the 68-team field.

The committee’s composition has been unchanged for about 15 years since being expanded from nine members to 10. Since then, in addition to the introduction of the autonomy governance system, there have been numerous changes in conference alignments that have affected regional balances. For example, the American Athletic Conference is still considered an East region conference even though many of its member schools are in the South.

As for the revenue distribution format, the issue relates to criteria that are being proposed for academically driven portion of the NCAA’s revenue-sharing plan. Though that pool of money could start out as being relatively small, it could grow quickly under one proposal which involves the pool getting all of the incrementally new revenue for the first four years of its creation and then half of the incrementally new revenue in future years.

Jennifer Fraser, the NCAA’s Division I governance director, said that in order to qualify for a share from this pool, schools would have to meet at least one of three criteria on an athletic-department-wide basis: an APR of at least 985, a GSR of at least 90 or athletes having a Federal graduation rate that is at least 13 percentage points greater than that of the entire undergraduate student body.

During a presentation Saturday before the College Athletic Business Management Association, NCAA chief financial officer Kathleen McNeely said this setup would result in 33% to 36% of Division I schools not being eligible to receive this academic distribution.

Ensor said during Monday’s meeting that two schools in his conference, which he declined to identify, would fall into this group. More broadly, he said, there is concern that schools that already have larger athletics budgets are in the best position to pay for the most comprehensive academic support for athletes, which, in turn, aids performance.

Colonial Athletic Association commissioner Joe D’Antonio said during an interview after the meeting that he understands and supports the intent of the academic-based distribution, but hopes the pool may have less money than the one proposal now offers or perhaps be based on somewhat different criteria.

“If 100% of the membership is achieving the (academic) success model, then I really don’t know if it’s a success model,” D’Antonio said.

“I think there has to be a window for institutions to be able to excel … but we need to try to find a model that is as fair as possible to the entire membership, and more than likely that model is not one that gives 100% of the new revenue to academic success, but gives some type of percentage – and maybe it’s not the exact (academic criteria) that was talked about.”