He noted wryly, with a wink to the college sports industry being built on the backs of unpaid athletes, that “without the rest of us, it may just start to look like a commercial enterprise.”
Still, there was enough in the proposal to draw the support of a majority of Division II and III schools.
The streamlined constitution would “untie some of the knots, if you want to call it that, that prohibit the divisions to do some of the things they want to do,” said Shane Lyons, the West Virginia athletic director, who serves on the Board of Governors and the Division I Board of Directors.
Any transformational changes, Lyons said, would begin to take shape in the coming weeks as the Division I, II and III committees began laying out how greater autonomy would look. The Division I committee will begin examining issues like enforcement, revenue distribution, recruiting calendars and anything else that might be laid out in the weighty rule book.
Julie Cromer, the athletic director at Ohio University and the committee co-chair with Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey, said there are some on the committee who want to go through it with a scalpel. Others, she said, would prefer to toss it on a bonfire and start from scratch.
But within Division I, not everyone will have a voice on the committee charged with chartering a new future. There are 32 conferences — 11 of which will be left out.
Talya Minsberg and Alan Blinder contributed reporting.