Myles Brand

Miles brand, mel simon, bob knight, henry gibson, pancreatitis symptoms

Myles Brand, who fired basketball coach Bob Knight for bad behavior at Indiana University and later led a crackdown by college sports’ governing body on academic failure, died today of pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

Brand, the fourth president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, also was credited with increasing commercial opportunities and broadening revenue distribution among member schools, while trying to make athletes more a part of the overall student body.

The keystone of his work was the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate program, which measured the success of each athletic team in keeping athletes on track to graduate. Teams slipping behind faced penalties, including the loss of athletic scholarships.

“He led the effort to produce the most significant academic reform in the history of the NCAA,” said Dr. William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. “It really burrowed down to the individual coaches and programs, and made them responsible in a way that never existed before.”

The senior NCAA staff will run the national office until the executive committee names an interim president, spokeswoman Dana Thomas said in an e-mail.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said that while Brand will be remembered as an academic reformer, what distinguished his presidency was his business sense.

“None of us appreciated in advance just how entrepreneurial he was,” Swarbrick said in an interview. “The number of acquisitions he made was remarkable. In one of the most conservative cultures, he encouraged us to maximize our revenue. It changed the NCAA’s risk profile.”

Revenue Jump

Brand became NCAA president in 2003. During his tenure, the association’s revenue rose to $661 million in 2008-09 from $437.8 million.

Limited liability corporations were established to acquire and run basketball’s National Invitation Tournament, operate a center for gauging athlete eligibility and provide education and certification for referees, umpires and other sports officials.

“Tax exempt doesn’t equate to, ‘Don’t make money,’” association spokesman Wally Renfro said. “Myles has always been critical drawing that distinction. He said we shouldn’t exploit the student, and shouldn’t become professional, but we should draw all the resources we can. Athletics has an educational value and we need to fund it.”

Myles Brand was born on May 17, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York. He played basketball and ran track in high school, and played a year of basketball and lacrosse at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

University President

Brand earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester in 1967 and was serving as the provost and vice- president of academic affairs at Ohio University in 1989 when he was hired as president at the University of Oregon. In 1994, he left Oregon to become president at Indiana, where he stayed until becoming president of the NCAA on Jan. 1, 2003.

It irked Brand that after a long career as an academic reformer, he was often introduced as the man who fired Knight, who had won three national championships in 29 years with the Hoosiers while also gaining headlines with his temper.

Indiana began investigating Knight after former player Neil Reed said the coach choked him during a practice in 1997. Knight denied the claims until a videotape showed him grabbing Reed by the neck.

Brand slapped what he called a “zero-tolerance policy” on the coach and said Knight would be fired if he stepped out of line again. That line was crossed four months later, when Knight grabbed and cursed a student on the Bloomington, Indiana, campus who had addressed him by his last name.

‘Embarrassed’ School

Brand described Knight’s behavior as “defiant and hostile,” and said that over the four-month zero-tolerance period, Knight also had verbally abused a university administrator, made angry remarks that “embarrassed” the school and failed to attend several alumni events.

“No one incident rose to the level of dismissal of coach Knight,” Brand said when the firing was announced on Sept. 10, 2000. “But his persistent and troubling pattern of behavior had to be addressed.”

As Brand’s academic policies began to take hold and graduation rates climbed, he turned his attention to athletic department finances and the growth of salaries, expenses and state subsidies.

In 2005, he formed a task force to review athletic department spending and try to create fiscal barometers.

Too Much Debt

Brand said athletic departments were carrying too much debt and that schools were dipping into general funds to balance sports budgets.

Athletic budgets were increasing 8 percent-12 percent annually, compared to 3 percent-4 percent for university budgets, he said during an interview in 2006. He called for greater accountability and faculty oversight.

Brand at the same time acknowledged that the NCAA couldn’t legally force individual schools to limit their spending.

“There’s no hammer,” he said. “That’s what makes fiscal reform so difficult.”

Critics say Brand could have used his position to encourage college football programs to hire more minorities, and to redistribute a greater share of the Bowl Championship Series payout to smaller conferences.

Brand couldn’t attend the NCAA convention this year because of his illness. He issued a statement Jan. 17, 2009 saying he was being treated for pancreatic cancer and that the long-term prognosis was “not good.”

Brand is survived by his wife, Margaret, and a son, Josh. Funeral arrangements are pending, the NCAA said in a news release.