Knight Commission

The commission issued its groundbreaking report, Keeping Faith with the Student Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics,[1] in 1991. In the report, the Knight Commission proposed a major overhaul in the way colleges run their athletic departments, proposing what it called the “one-plus-three” model — in which the “one,” control by the college president, is directed toward the “three” goals of academic integrity, financial integrity and independent certification. The report was influential in the implementation of many reforms by the NCAA, including a major restructuring within the NCAA itself, when in 1996 the governance of the association was taken away from college athletic directors and put into the hands of college presidents.

In 2001, the commission issued its second major report, largely detailing what had transpired in the ten years since Keeping Faith was issued. A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education [2] reiterated almost all of the original report's recommendations, while taking note that roughly two-thirds of the reforms recommended in Keeping Faith had been implemented to one degree or another.

One notable recommendation in A Call to Action was that the NCAA restrict participation in postseason to teams whose graduation rate is 50 percent or greater, a concept that influenced the development of NCAA academic policies and, ultimately, its 2011 adoption of an academic threshold for postseason competition.

The Knight Commission’s third report Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports [3] was released in 2010. It calls for strengthening accountability through transparency, rewarding practices that make academics a priority, and treating athletes as students first.

The Commission reemphasized a central recommendation in its 2001 report that teams be required to be on track to graduate at last half of their players to be eligible for postseason competition. The NCAA voted to adopt this proposal in October 2011 using a metric the NCAA created in 2004 to project graduation rates based on eligibility and retention (the Academic Progress Rate).

The report also recommended that a portion of the NCAA financial incentives reward academic outcomes. The NCAA adopted changes to its revenue distribution formula in 2016 to reward academic outcomes.

Financial data in the report revealed that athletics spending and subsidies provided by most FBS institutions to their athletics budgets are rising more quickly than educational budgets. This, together with opinions from a 2009 “Presidential Survey on the Cost and Financing of Intercollegiate Athletics,”[4] underscored the Commission's urgency to address the escalating costs of college sports through collaborative measures, which require support from presidents, NCAA leadership, university boards of trustees and conferences across the country.

The Knight Commission’s efforts to provide greater financial transparency in college sports also led to the NCAA changing its annual financial report at the Commission’s request in order to require separate reporting for bonuses paid to college football coaches for postseason appearances and wins; Prior NCAA changes to the report had masked the full bonus compensation paid to FBS football coaches by including bonuses with all postseason expenses.[5]

In 2018, the Knight Commission proposed several reforms to The Commission on College Basketball, led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – which was formed in response to the 2017 college basketball scandal.[6] The Rice Commission advanced a longstanding Knight Commission recommendation to add independent directors to the NCAA Board of Governors, the organization’s highest-ranking governing body. The following year, the NCAA implemented this recommendation, adding five independent members to its board.

In 2019, the Commission revamped its free College Athletics Financial Information (CAFI) Database, providing detailed financial information on athletics revenues at over 220 public NCAA Division I colleges and universities, dating back to 2005. The database has been used in many national sports stories examining money in college sports.[7]

In December 2019, the Commission launched "Transforming the NCAA D-I Model", a year-long examination of the overall NCAA Division I model, focusing especially on the impact of FBS football on D-I sports as a whole.[8] The Commission held four public forums during this process, all virtually due to COVID-19.[9]

Separate from its examination of the overall D-I model, in April 2020 the Commission recommended five principles to guide the development of policies that will allow college athletes to earn compensation for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). A few weeks later the NCAA’s proposed new NIL rules aligned with several of the Commission’s proposed principles. The Knight Commission also released an educational video, “An Introduction to Name, Image and Likeness Rules for College Athletes,” narrated by Commission member David Robinson and fellow former college sports star Elizabeth Beisel.[10]

As part of "Transforming the NCAA D-I Model", the Commission recommended that the NCAA eliminate the current rules exemption that includes FBS football in its formula for revenue distributions from the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament, even though FBS football does not meet the NCAA's normal criterion for inclusion in this formula—an NCAA-operated national championship.[11][lower-alpha 1]

The Commission issued its final recommendations from "Transforming the NCAA D-I Model" on December 3, 2020, presenting them to NCAA president Mark Emmert shortly before releasing them publicly. The following recommendations were made:[12][13]

• FBS football should be governed by a new entity completely outside of NCAA control. The proposed body, which the Commission called the "National College Football Association" (NCFA) for convenience, would be responsible for all aspects of FBS football currently governed by the NCAA.
• The NCFA would be funded primarily by College Football Playoff revenues.
• D-I membership in all sports except FBS football would remain unchanged.
• With the creation of the NCFA, D-I governance would be reorganized around men's basketball, the only sport sponsored by all D-I members.[lower-alpha 2]
• In addition, the current D-I governance system, with voting rights weighted in favor of the FBS conferences, would be replaced by equal weighting for all D-I conferences.

As of 2021, the commission's co-chairs are Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education; Len Elmore, attorney, former ESPN analyst and former standout basketball player for the University of Maryland, the NBA and the ABA; and Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor Emeritus, State University of New York. The commission's CEO is Amy Privette Perko, who previously worked as team president of the Fayetteville Patriots (an NBA development league team); Associate Athletics Director/Senior Women Administrator at the University of Kansas; and NCAA enforcement representative.

Other better-known members:

• Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner, NFL
• G.P. “Bud” Peterson, President, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Jacques McClendon, Director of Player Engagement, Los Angeles Rams and former football player, University of Tennessee and NFL player
• Eric Barron, President, Pennsylvania State University
• Scott Cowen, President Emeritus, Tulane University
• Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University
• Walter Harrison, President Emeritus, University of Hartford
• Christopher Howard, President, Robert Morris University; former football player, U.S. Air Force Academy

• Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics official web site
• Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports
• John S. and James L. Knight Foundation