Myles Leaves Indelible Brand on NCAA

As a college coach friend and I were being seated for an early dinner in a mostly empty hotel restaurant overlooking the Detroit River on the eve of the last Final Four, we spied Myles Brand and his wife, Peg. They were sitting alone at a table tucked deeper into the quietude of this large dining room with sweeping windows from which we could all watch the sun set.

And we knew Brand was counting the sunsets then. It had been just a couple of months since he publicly disclosed that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a cancer that he said had taken away a quarter of the rest of his life.

So we pushed away from our table and walked over to Brand's. Brand rose, recognizing my friend warmly first, and then he greeted me. He introduced his wife. We all exchanged pleasantries. Brand, speaking even more softly than I recalled, and his wife managed to smile. Then we excused ourselves and wished the Brands a nice weekend in the Motor City.

Brand was 66 then. He was 67 when he died Wednesday.

If anyone epitomized the West African proverb about speaking softly and carrying a big stick, it was Brand -- the philosophy professor who became famous as a college president because he told Bob Knight to take a hike, and then cajoled the NCAA as its president to be accountable for the first half of its favorite phrase, student-athlete.

There is nothing in Brand's early biography to suggest he would become such a famous figure in college sports. He was born in Brooklyn and graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where, I just learned Wednesday, he played basketball and lacrosse as a freshman. He got his Ph.D in philosophy at Rochester and started his pedagogical career at Pittsburgh. He chaired a department at Illinois-Chicago and became a dean at Arizona. He was an educator and an administrator. He became a vice president and provost at Ohio State before presiding over Oregon and finally Indiana.

It was in Bloomington, Ind., where the rest of us became aware of Brand. It was a year and a day before 9/11. He fired the irascible Hoosiers Hall of Fame basketball coach Bob Knight.

Many of us looking at Bloomington from the outside championed Brand for what none of Knight's other bosses dared to do. In Bloomington, Brand was torched in effigy, his home was targeted by an angry mob and he and his wife were spirited away for their own safety by police.

But that isn't the act for which Brand should be remembered when it comes to college sports. After all, that was an act taken against one coach at one school that affected its athletic department and its fans. It wasn't transcendent; it was historical footnote.

Instead, what Brand should be remembered for when it comes to college sports is what he did after leaving Indiana and took the job of running the NCAA. For what he did at the NCAA left an indelible mark on every university under its umbrella. Brand forced college athletic bosses to take some responsibility for the college education of their charges, too.The old philosophy professor reminded money-hungry presidents, athletic directors and coaches that they worked at institutions of higher learning and weren't just makers of future pro athletes. How novel was that?

The old philosophy professor reminded money-hungry presidents, athletic directors and coaches that they worked at institutions of higher learning and weren't just makers of future pro athletes. How novel was that?

Brand was embarrassed about statistics that showed most college athletic departments didn't care nearly as much about the development of young minds as they did the strengthening of young bodies. A survey by the college athletics watchdog group known as the Knight Commission found one year that almost one-third of the teams playing in the men's NCAA Tournament -- 20 out of the 65 teams -- failed to graduate as much as 30 percent of their players within six years.

Brand decided to press NCAA members to make academic performance of athletes as important as athletic achievement. He lobbied for rules not just to force athletes to work toward a degree by threatening them with the loss of their scholarships. More important, he put the onus back on the men and women who romanced parents and guardians all of the country to take their children and turn them into productive and successful adults. For the first time in history, Brand made the NCAA see to it that schools with teams stocked with athletes who failed to graduate, or make progress toward doing so, would be penalized. They could lose scholarships. They could lose the right to participate in postseason play. They could lose access to their outrageous revenue stream.

There is nothing perfect about the Brand plan since he started pushing it about four years ago and finally got it implemented by 2006. A lot of experts on athletics and higher education have picked it apart and criticized it for one thing or another.

But the one thing no one questions is the demand his program put on learning, especially for a class of college students who seemed to be making more and more of a mockery of college education. Brand pointed college athletics back in a direction from which it never should have strayed and he was able to do so bloodlessly. As the Coalition for Intercollegiate Athletics, a national faculty group concerned with out-of-control sports lamented early Thursday morning in a press release: "President Brand's commitment to academic ideals and to guiding college sports towards a mission to support the pursuit of knowledge was an expression of values we celebrate."

The last I saw of Myles Brand was when he and his wife rose from their table and walked by the one at which my friend and I were dining. The Brands stopped and Myles said he hoped to see us later. Then, with his wife holding his hand, he turned and walked slowly down a long curving aisle next to the windows and out of the door.

I don't recall if the sun had set by then; it just seemed like it.