Academic Integrity in Intercollegiate Athletics: Principles, Rules, and Best Practices
4. Time Commitment, Missed Class Time, and Scheduling of Competitions
It is sometimes said that education is the only industry where the less one provides for the price the more pleased customers are – most of us, when we are students, welcome a day off from class or a homework-free weeknight. Athletes are no different, and the rewards of competition in an area of their special skills have the potential for many to weaken further the commitment to coursework and class attendance. Faculty work hard to engage students in learning, and perhaps in no other area does a university signal an inappropriate prioritization of athletics over academics than when, by policy or by administrative decisions, it sends the message that training or competitions take priority over class attendance and coursework. While travel time and the practicalities of tournament play may make some missed class days inevitable, it is the responsibility of faculty and administrators, at individual schools and in conferences, to ensure that missed time is kept to a carefully designed minimum.
4.1 Total time commitment
The NCAA has established detailed rules and monitoring procedures designed to limit to four hours per day and twenty hours per week the amount of training and competition time athletes are required to devote to their sports. This limit pertains only to required activities set by the coaching staff, not to personal decisions athletes may make to devote time to training, and for safety reasons, NCAA bylaws allow for coaching staff to provide general supervision for athletes undertaking personal training beyond the twenty-hour limit.
There is widespread belief that the twenty-hour rule is in many programs routinely violated, either purposefully, by coaching staffs, or because monitoring is not pursued with care or in good faith. Individual athletes must make their own choices about the amount of time they can devote to training, and the best choices will vary widely among athletes. But coaching staffs and others acting for the university are obligated to abide by the twenty-hour rule.
NCAA and conference groups continue to discuss how refinements in the twenty-hour rule can better accomplish its goals, and the COIA encourages these efforts. However, training-time issues involve an unusual number of ambiguous situations, and problems have less to do with inadequate rules than with a failure by coaching staffs to take seriously the academic priorities of the students who play for them. In the view of the COIA, to accomplish the goals of the twenty-hour rule, incentives must be created to help coaching staffs see their role as helping to foster the all-around student development that athletics has the potential to reinforce, rather than to maximize athletics excellence, even at the cost of academics.
For this reason, the COIA supports a proposal under discussion by the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletes (N4A):
4.1.1 Head coaches must share accountability for the academic achievement of the athletes they select for admissions consideration. Data on continuing eligibility and graduation rates of each recruiting class brought by individual head coaches to their institutions should be maintained, relevant to the period during which the coach was employed at that institution and according to uniform standards, to establish a public record of the academic success of each coach. This record should follow a coach from institution to institution.
Such a process will increase the likelihood that a coach’s commitment to appropriate academic-athletics balance will have an impact on the assessment of his or her success and the shape of his or her careers. It will also help ensure that in seeking team success, coaches are less likely inappropriately to recruit students who are not likely to succeed academically at their institutions, a practice that damages schools, students, and intercollegiate sports.
In addition, the COIA recommends as best practices:
4.1.2 The campus administration and athletics department, in consultation with the Campus Athletics Board, should establish clear policies regarding how the academic success of athletes bears on coaches’ job descriptions, and how academic performance will be weighed in reviews and personnel decisions regarding coaching staffs. Campus procedures should allow the Campus Athletics Board or its personnel subcommittee to review policy implementation, and to report annually to the campus administration and Faculty Governance Body its assessment of the integrity with which these policies are implemented.
4.1.3 Procedures for exit interviews with athletes should include a focus on issues pertaining to compliance with the twenty-hour rule, and these data should be considered by the Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) and Campus Athletics Board in assessments of program integrity.
4.2 Calendar approval procedures
Missed class days are a matter of academic integrity. It is essential that faculty recognize and respect the fact that classes missed because of competition are beyond the control of athletes, and make accommodations to allow athletes to complete course requirements without prejudice. But when athletes miss more than a minimal number of classes instructional goals are undermined and time and resources are increasingly diverted to help athletes compensate, at cost to faculty and other students. Accordingly, faculty have a deep interest in ensuring that athletics scheduling accords with NCAA principles for minimizing interference with academics, and competition schedules should be approved with meaningful faculty participation.
Schedules are developed at both institutional and conference levels, and procedures for approval at both levels should involve faculty. Many scheduling arrangements are made years in advance and others are determined in the context of complex contract negotiations on the conference level. Meaningful faculty participation means that approval of appropriate faculty, such as FARs and members of the Campus Athletics Board, is sought at points where changes in scheduling can realistically be made.
The COIA recommends the following best practices:
4.2.1 Each campus should develop a set of principles concerning norms and limits of missed class time that should guide annual approval decisions in each sport. These principles should be developed in consultation with the FAR, the Campus Athletics Board, and the Faculty Governance Body.
4.2.2 Each conference should develop a set of principles concerning norms and limits of missed class time that should guide annual approval decisions in each sport. These principles should be developed by conference FARs, in consultation with their Campus Athletics Boards and Faculty Governance Bodies, and should not be less restrictive than campus-based principles of conference members.
4.2.3 Annual conference competition schedules should be in accord with conference principles on missed class time and be adopted only with approval by conference FARs, who should be consulted on all conference scheduling plans and options at a point early enough that their views will affect the final plan offered for their approval.
4.2.4 Annual non-conference competition schedules should accord with individual campus principles on missed class time and be adopted only with approval by the Campus Athletics Board, which should be consulted on all conference scheduling plans and options at a point early enough that its views will affect the final plan offered for their approval.
4.3 Season length and scheduling
NCAA bylaws specify that member institutions shall limit season length and other scheduling elements to minimize interference with the academic programs of its athletes. However, it is clear that in certain sports, seasons are so long or scheduled in such a way as to interfere with coursework to an unacceptable degree. This is particularly true of some spring sports such as baseball, softball, and golf, where the high number of competitions requires many missed class days, and of basketball, where the competitive season bridges two semester terms. In addition, the growth of post-season competition in some sports over the past few decades has resulted in a lengthening of the total season, and conference reorganizations that have broadened the geographical scope of many conferences have added travel time.
In addition, there is an increasing trend in televised sports for conferences to enter into contracts that require weekday or weeknight competitions. These add to the class days missed by athletes. Particularly problematic are cases where schools without facilities to accommodate the demands of weekday football nevertheless agree to television contracts that require them to do so, resulting in the canceling of a class day for an entire campus in order to stage a sports event.
Although schools theoretically control their scheduling choices, in fact, the dynamics of conference play and the role of conferences in media contracts make the conference a key player in determining schedules. In recent years, the proliferation of pre-season tournaments as well as post-season conference tournaments has contributed more than any other single factor to the lengthening of seasons.
Competitive seasons should be long enough to allow athletes to progress in skill development, coalesce in team sports, allow most or all team members chances to participate in a variety of competitive situations, and establish a basis for overall team competition based on total wins and losses. These criteria allow intercollegiate athletics to accomplish the positive effects that give it value to students and campuses. Seasons should not extend over more competitions or more calendar time than necessary to accomplish these goals, since further extension generates at best diminishing positive returns at direct cost to the academic progress of athletes. With regard to season length, COIA supports the following proposal:
4.3.1 The NCAA should continue to review the present limits on regular season length, in order to determine the number of competitions necessary to accomplish the basic goals of each sport. NCAA limits on regular season competitions should be adjusted to match these recommendations. Adjustments that are warranted on academic grounds must be made regardless of the financial implications; if it is found that the season schedule of a revenue sport, such as basketball, is creating challenges to academic success too demanding for athletes realistically to meet, its length must be reduced.
The NCAA permits schools to divide seasons into two distinct segments in sports other than football and basketball; this option may be restricted to a split of training seasons, but may also involve intercollegiate competitions. In some sports, this has led to the establishment of “non-traditional playing seasons.” Engagement in both traditional and non-traditional seasons means athletes may experience no school terms free of the pressures of intercollegiate competitions, and for students who need a “breather” to focus on academics, this can be a difficult problem that outweighs any possible benefits a split season may offer. Therefore:
4.3.2 NCAA bylaws should be amended so that divided competition seasons are not permitted.
4.3.3 In recent years athletics schedules have expanded in at least the following additional two ways, which impinge on the academic schedule: 1) seasons have been expanded at the beginning and at the end, particularly with regard to the proliferation of post-season conference tournaments, 2) athletic events have increasingly been scheduled on weekdays. The Coalition urges the NCAA and the conferences to begin reversing these trends. We recognize that for some universities and in some sports, this goal may remain elusive and that the process may require as long as a decade to accomplish.
4.3.4 Institutions should not permit cancellation of campuswide classes for an athletics event. We urge the NCAA Division IA membership to explore ways in which this can become a uniformly observed principle.
It is travel to other schools for competitions that most often leads to missed class days for athletes.
4.3.5 The NCAA should collect data and develop norms governing maximum times before and after competitions that travel schedules may permit. Such policy should include guidelines for exceptional cases and a waiver procedure, but should establish uniformity in the priority given to minimizing missed class days.
Academic calendars differ among schools and it is difficult to generalize about what periods of time may be more important academically than others. However, it is unquestionable that periods of final exams are critical and athletes should not be required to participate in competitions during final exam periods. Ultimately, competition calendars are primarily developed at the conference level and approved by institutions. The Coalition recommends that the following rule be adopted at the highest level of application possible: either at the institutional and conference levels, or as an NCAA bylaw:
4.3.6 An institution shall not schedule athletics competitions during final exam periods on that school’s campus; conferences shall develop their schedules to accommodate the final exam calendars of all member institutions.
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