Chris Kennedy has worked for decades in athletic administration, but even for a veteran like him, the current collegiate athletic environment is a puzzle.
"In all my years, I've never been so uncertain about the future," Kennedy said, addressing the Academic Council Thursday. "I can't say where we will be down the road. I can't predict what it will mean for Duke."
On the heels of lawsuits, changes in NCAA governance and a series of classroom and legal controversies, Kennedy and Jim Coleman, Duke law faculty and chair of the Duke Athletic Council, briefed faculty on the trends and Duke's ability to shape the national discussion.
Kennedy and Coleman described an environment where change is coming from different directions. Within the NCAA itself, one factor, Kennedy said, "is the chafing of the power conferences [including Duke's Atlantic Coast Conference] who feel that they are being held back."
The power conferences, leading a so-called "Autonomy Movement," won the right this fall to augment benefits to student-athletes. Some of these can protect the students, Kennedy said, giving them rights to greater disability insurance, health care coverage and aid for education expenses after their athletic eligibility expires.
But the costs are unknown, he said, and the form of the benefits won't be known until proposed legislation is revealed on Dec. 1, he said.
At the same time, several court decisions threw some long-standing NCAA rules and traditions into question, Coleman said. Most prominent of these was a case involving former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon who sued along with other athletes to be compensated for the use of their names and images in video games.
The ruling was narrow, Coleman said, but opened the door for other decisions that may significantly change the relationship of student-athletes to the universities they compete for.
"The controlling issue is one of antitrust," Coleman said. "One way to see these cases is we currently have 'arms control' agreements restricting what universities can offer students at the upper end of athletics. The regulations that enforce these agreements are under attack as serving as antitrust agreements in that they restrain competition among member universities."
Coleman said he couldn't predict the outcome of these court cases and said it will likely take some time before they are all sorted out. Regardless, it's likely to mean larger budgets for big sports such as men's basketball and football, which raises questions about support for other sports.
In fact, one of the challenges President Richard Brodhead told council members is the recent court decisions may contradict other, long-standing legal requirements, in particular the Title IX regulations requiring gender equity in collegiate sports.
"These decisions make for a complicated time," Brodhead said. "There are countervailing pressures that don’t give institutions the space to make decisions for themselves."
There won't be simple solutions, the speakers warned. When asked if Duke could resign from the ACC and join the Ivies, Brodhead said that would only increase the university's athletic costs as even the Ivy League faces the same pressures although with less incoming revenue.
"There are versions of athletics that are complementary to the virtues of academics," Brodhead said. "It is a way people learn certain things such as leadership, discipline and other values. However, athletics can also be a way of learning things antithetical to university values. We at Duke can take some pride that we've put those together athletics and academics at a high level. Not many universities are trying to do things that we're trying to do. That's not going to change."