FanHouse Myles Brand

In the wake of Myles Brand's death last Wednesday, the NCAA was left without a president and no clear rules in place for succession. Considering Brand's prognosis wasn't very good for quite a while -- he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January and not given great odds of survival -- it's a bit surprising the organization didn't address the issue before he perished.

It appears the NCAA will continue its search for a replacement, as they have named only a temporary president. James Isch, the NCAA's vice president for administration and chief financial officer, has been named the interim president.

As a college coach friend and I were being seated for an early dinner in a mostly empty hotel restaurant overlooking the Detroit River on the eve of the last Final Four, we spied Myles Brand and his wife, Peg. They were sitting alone at a table tucked deeper into the quietude of this large dining room with sweeping windows from which we could all watch the sun set.

And we knew Brand was counting the sunsets then. It had been just a couple of months since he publicly disclosed that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a cancer that he said had taken away a quarter of the rest of his life.

You know 2009 is the the summer of NCAA violations when sports betting sites take aim at the action. In a sign as momentous as when the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed (this might be in my mind because I went to see the most epically bad movie of the summer in Year One. Seriously it's awful.), BetUS.com laid action on which school was the most likely to receive the next NCAA violation. NCAA president Myles Brand just broke a crystal gavel in the NCAA corporate offices.

USC leads the pack at 8-1, followed by Ohio State at 9-1, Florida and Ole Miss at 10-1. I think I speak for everyone when I say that Tennessee at 14-1 is an extremely attractive option. And how in the world is Iowa also 14-1, don't you at least have to have good players for penalties to seem likely? Or is that a subtle nod to the slow derailment that has been the Kirk Ferentz era? Regardless, I think we all know what this means, the NCAA enforcement procedure has become such a joke, that we can all have fun with teams breaking the rules. See no evil, hear no evil, fear no evil: Welcome to the 21st Century NCAA.

So Blake Griffin is ready to make the jump now. The whole thing is nicely wrapped up with a bow for David Stern and Myles Brand, who should be high-fiving, lighting up victory cigars.

The Naismith Award winner, the nation's best college basketball player, is more mature for having stayed at Oklahoma for his sophomore year. He probably worked some education in somewhere, too. So yes, this worked out perfectly for him to jump to the NBA now.

So Blake Griffin is ready to make the jump now. The whole thing is nicely wrapped up with a bow for David Stern and Myles Brand, who should be high-fiving, lighting up victory cigars.

The Naismith Award winner, the nation's best college basketball player, is more mature for having stayed at Oklahoma for his sophomore year. He probably worked some education in somewhere, too. So yes, this worked out perfectly for him to jump to the NBA now.

Myles Brand is notorious for valuing academics above athletics while serving as NCAA president. He is also famous for dismissing Bob Knight from Indiana University following a 2000 incident.

And now he is, sadly, making headlines with an announcement Saturday that he has pancreatic cancer and that things, from a long-term perspective, do not appear good.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports has a thought-provoking column about the O.J. Mayo mess, and he believes that when the NCAA is tarnished by allegations of runners for agents handing out cash to star athletes, one person deserves a heaping helping of blame: Myles Brand.

If you didn't see this one coming, don't feel bad, you're no more naive and gullible than NCAA president Myles Brand. ...

the entire circumstance was created when Myles Brand decided to sell the NCAA's soul to David Stern's 19-year-old age limit.

Brand welcomed the one-and-done phenom for whatever ratings bump they provide. In doing so, he stomped on everything his organization claims to stand for – education, amateurism, fairness, et al. He made the likes of O.J. Mayo inevitable.

Wetzel makes some good points here, and there's no question that Brand, the NCAA and the schools that field big-time football and basketball teams try to have it both ways when they insist that their players are students as much as they're athletes while basically operating as a minor league for the NFL and NBA.

But really, Brand has no control at all over the NBA's and NFL's minimum age rules. The truth is, Brand and the NCAA member schools ought to hold themselves to a certain set of standards irrespective of what the NFL and NBA do.

And that's the point here: If the NCAA had the courage of its convictions, it would go back to the days of freshman ineligibility and tell the Mayos of the world that they weren't going to treat college as a place to play ball for a few months before moving on. But the NCAA would rather have the money the Mayos of the world can generate.

There will be a press conference tomorrow which NCAA and NBA will announce a change to the NBA's draft eligibility policy. NBA commish David Stern and NCAA president Myles Brand will conduct the news conference.

Brand hinted Thursday the NCAA and NBA had worked out a deal to create a 20-year-old age limit, which would keep the best players in college for a minimum of two years.

The NBA adopted a 19-year-old age limit in its collective bargaining agreement with the players' association in 2006, which prevented high school players from jumping directly to the NBA.

This would essentially eliminate those "one-and-done" guys like Greg Oden, Kevin Durant and Brandan Wright from last year.

I love the rule because I think it is in the best interest of both the NBA and NCAA. The NBA will get a more experienced and skilled player (for every Kevin Durant, there are dozens of Brandan Wright's not playing) and the NCAA gets to keep its stars a bit longer. Imagine if Texas still had Durant or Ohio State had Oden? Would UNC been exposed by Kansas like that if Wright had still been around?

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that NCAA President Myles Brand was paid $895,000 in salary, benefits and expenses last year. What for?

University of Hartford president Walter Harrison, whose term as head of the NCAA's executive committee ended in April, said Brand is doing a "spectacular job."

"The job is incredibly challenging in a way most people wouldn't recognize," Harrison said. "Most people think of the major headlines -- congressional inquiries, overseeing academic reform, the controversies of the day. But there are lots of other things, like how one keeps the peace among numerous constituencies. And, he's running a $500 million organization."

So, the parts of his job that nobody knows about, he handles with enough aplomb to merit 4% and 3% raises in the last two years. Cool. No problems there.

The problem is, the part of his job that people do see --- they tend to think he sucks at it. Congress is breathing down the NCAA's neck as it considers eliminating its tax-exempt status. There's a pending class-action lawsuit filed on the behalf of former and current athletes who are seeking greater compensation. In the college football world, the NCAA's weak investigation and enforcement powers, silly and inflexible rules and tone-deaf handling of something so basic like the clock rules have people furious with NCAA leadership. There's also that little supplement issue where schools are afraid to give their athletes peanut butter for fear of breaking the rules.

And then there's the kicker, Brand's stated position of having the NCAA's mission overlap with "social advocacy". Last I checked, social causes weren't really part of the organization's fundamental mission.

In fact, it looks like a perverse overreach and has eroded public trust in the organization. Save the advocacy for groups professionally committed to those tasks who have the expertise and clarity of mission to pursue such causes. The NCAA has other fish to fry and frankly I'm not sure it has done a superb job at handling some of its more pertinent, basic, fundamental issues.

I don't find fault with Brand drawing such an impressive salary. I'm a capitalist - I say more power to him and may he find ways to make much more money through whatever legal avenues he can. But I am curious and deeply skeptical as to whether he's earned it and whether both Brand and the NCAA can do better for what he is being paid.

(H/T: The Wiz)

Last Wednesday, Congress allocated some time to addressing the "lack of minority head coaches in college and NFL" issue. It's a serious and worthy issue, but I think for a while now its biggest advocates have been going about things inefficiently.

The basic assumption for some may be that the combination of "old boys networks" and just plain discrimination are the biggest obstables getting in the way of legitimate opportunities for minority head coaches. Although it's insane to argue in the face of that, I will say it may not be the major stumbling block preventing more hirings.

I think the real issue is a lack of minority coordinators.

Coaching is a funny business. Besides the informal buddy-buddy networks that do create opportunities for those within them, one other feature is fairly dominant: the Order of Operations. In school many years ago we all probably learned how to solve certain mathematic equations through the word PEMDAS. That is, Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract.

Just as there's a natural order to basic math functions, there is a general order to ascending the coaching ladder. Although college and the NFL blend, young coaches must generally climb successive similar rungs to become head coaches.

In college, one's first position is often as a graduate assistant. The GA's are the lowest on the totem pole, often assisting position coaches and whatever else the head coach asks of them. After serving as GA's, they may jump to another GA spot at another school or be hired as an assistant/positition coach. Several years should follow at multiple schools assisting with various positions, learning lots of new ideas and ways to do things and networking with coaches from more than one school of thought.

Eventually, talented assistants will rise to the top and become offensive and defensive coordinators. This is a key point in a coaching career, because becoming an OC or DC is a lot like having that college degree, it gets you places. One also must manage an entire side of the ball, develop an offense or defense, develop game plans, create an agenda for the position coaches to follow and report to and work with the head coach. It's a lot of responsibility and one of those "sink or swim" jobs that can either elevate or destroy a career.

From a coordinator's position is where many coaches will launch their head coaching careers. There's almost no way around it except for a handful of coaches who somehow "pass go" without having been a coordinator (Mississippi's Ed Orgeron, for example).

A lack of minority head coaches indicates, at least in my mind, a lack in number or quality minority offensive and defensive coordinators. This should be the real push for those looking to see the necessary increase in minority head coaches. Lawsuits and embarrassment can only go so far when it's only reasonable that if there aren't many minority coordinators there won't be many head coaching opportunities.

Now, I don't have the hard data on how many minority coaches are coordinators in college and the NFL, but it makes sense that if talented minority coaches can saturate those ranks, head coaching opportunities will only continue to increase. Maybe I'm wrong and the proportion of minority coordinators is substantial enough that there should be more head coaches, but the coordinator issue remains important just the same.