Anyone remember Myles Brand, the former president here at Oregon?
No? Well, get used to the name. Bobby Knight knows it
by heart.
As Indiana University’s top administrative executive, Brand fired the legendary head coach of the Hoosier program. Brand was threatened, and his wife — a professor in Bloomington — even had to have police presence in her classroom. To top it all off, Knight has gone on to Texas Tech and has since won over the student body at that campus.
Last week, Brand was named as the fourth executive director in the history of the NCAA, effective Jan. 1, 2003.
The man in the spotlight in 2000, as the Knight issue came to a boil, has been thrust into the limelight once again. Not only does he favor academics over athletics, he doesn’t exactly have an extensive background in collegiate sports.
Still, Brand has already helped reject some proposals for college sports that were more absurd than sensical. He rejected proposals of keeping freshmen from playing sports and banning some of the more high-profile sports.
Most importantly, he rejected a proposal to detach athletics from the University so that athletes could be paid.
Whoever came up with that one needs to have his or her head examined.
Still, Brand has a long way to go before he wins over the hearts of most colleges in America, including fans in the Eugene area. He made a statement upon his appointment last week that definitely shouldn’t sit well with Duck backers.
“We must make certain that academic concerns are first and foremost,” Brand told a National Press Club audience recently. “To do that, we don’t have to turn off the game. We just have to turn down the volume.”
Turn down the volume? That’s exactly the opposite direction the Ducks have taken.
From Autzen Stadium on down to Oregon merchandise, the Ducks have done everything it takes to get noticed. Each team’s uniform is stylish, while each gigantic poster in downtown New York screams “Look at us!”
And that “us” is not just athletics. The Oregon folks up top have done it right, modeling the public relations attempts at the University as a whole, not just the football program.
There is nothing wrong with having athletics help enrollment at a university. Based on current enrollment numbers at Oregon, one could make a reasonable assumption that they have increased, not only because of improved academics, but also because football has taken leaps and bounds off the map while each other program has seemingly improved.
Athletics, in this day and age, gets universities noticed. That is really vital to Oregon.
Academics, as Brand inferred, do need to be at the forefront of a university’s purpose, but it is possible to do so without taking away from athletics. The two can co-exist as they do now. Tinkering is not needed.
So, getting back to Brand, it almost seems like he could be directly pointing at Oregon without actually saying so.
He was president at a time when Oregon was just beginning to realize its potential on the gridiron, from 1989-94. He was here when the Len Casanova Athletic Center went up, signaling the
rebirth of a program that had been dormant for years.
Then, four years after his resignation from Oregon, the Moshofsky Sports Center was dedicated, this time proclaiming Oregon’s rise to the top of the Pacific-10 Conference.
Brand was there at the beginning. So now, it seems, he is calling for a stop to the process he helped oversee.
Granted, Oregon is just a prime example because it is in our back yard. Who knows where Florida will go with its program, or what UCLA is thinking of doing in
the future?
So to single out and say that he is doing this because, specifically, Oregon has jumped the gun on every program in the Pac-10 and most in the country, is absurd.
And make no mistake, he is not entirely “anti-athletics” as is assumed by many who have followed his appointment.
Still, his words sound off with a tinge of irony.