100 days leading college athletics

Today marks the 100th day of former IU president Myles Brand's tenure as head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.\nAs Brand has moved on, so has IU.\nIn the months after his departure to Indianapolis, Bloomington has seen a make-over in the upper echelon of the academic and athletic administration. Gerald Bepko has assumed Brand's old position on an interim basis, and Terry Clapacs was given the athletic directors position this week. \nBrand went from a president of a university where he held the last say over a single collegiate athletic department to being the man in charge of all college athletics.\nIn little over three months since Brand's official term began on Jan. 1, the NCAA has begun to conform to Brand's molding. Academic reform of potentially large proportions, which backs his commitment to holding academics in a higher regard than in the past, has begun to take shape.\nIn the highly-debated second phase of an incentives/disincentives package that Brand has spearheaded, postseason eligibility, among other perks, will be in question because of low graduation rates.\nBepko, who said he is not too familiar with the proposed reform, feels that because it is Brand at the helm, it must be right.\n"If it is consistent with Myles' work of the last eight years and has the same academic values in it as does IU, I'd be 100 percent for it," Bepko said.\nDuring the search for a new president, the NCAA Executive Committee was impressed by Brand's stance on academic reform in athletics.\n"He had been a president at a major university and he had faced significant financial challenges," president of IU board of trustees Fred Eichhorn said.\nBrand's major piece of academic reform is the development of an academic progress scale called the Annual Academic Progress Rate. The AAPR is "more of a real-time snapshot of a team's academic performance," according to the NCAA. This system should be implemented in the next few years.\nBrand did not return repeated phone messages for this story.