NCAA president Mark Emmert has called for a special convention next January to reevaluate how the top level of college athletics is governed, the Indianapolis Star reported. The announcement comes after coaches and commissioners from the most powerful conferences with the biggest budgets vented their frustration over the past two weeks at media days ahead of the start of the 2013 college football season. “There’s one thing that virtually everybody in Division I has in common right now, and that is they don’t like the governance model,” Emmert told the Star. “Now, there’s not agreement on what the new model should be. But there’s very little support for continuing things in the governing process the way they are today.” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby indicated it could be time to create a new division of NCAA athletics that would allow the schools with the biggest athletic department budgets to act free of the financial constraints of smaller Division I schools. The divide between the haves and have-nots became most obvious when proposals to allow cost-of-attendance stipends were defeated, reflecting the revenue gap created by a new round of huge television contracts for the five so-called “power” conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12. more
