From Tim Sands, the chair of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors and VT President … What can we do, as university presidents and chancellors, to set college athletics onto a sustainable path, at least in the short run? Conversations about pooling media rights, superconferences and professionalizing football and maybe basketball through collective bargaining are fascinating and may be part of a lasting solution, but they are several years away from implementation even if a path to get there were to be identified immediately. The NCAA and DI conferences are advocating for support from Congress for the SCORE Act or something similar, but there is no guarantee that such legislation will be enacted in the near future. By contrast, there are steps that the NCAA DI membership can take now in the interest of fairness, safety and academic integrity that are largely under the control of presidents and chancellors, especially those from Power Four institutions. We could protect the student-athlete model by introducing duration-of-eligibility rules, similar to long-standing rules in other nonprofessional sports organizations, to promote safety for competitors and opportunities for high school graduates, and we could create a permissible contact period for recruitment after the season ends and before the opening of the transfer portal. Ideas such as these, and many others, are currently being discussed in various venues. Within conferences, we have more options if we are willing to stand up for the student-athlete model at the risk of introducing temporary competitive disadvantages. A conference could elect to restrict transfers into or within the conference in support of academic progress, perhaps through the vehicle of institutional revenue-sharing contracts. A conference could also decide to unilaterally implement a common-sense transfer rule that balances freedom to transfer with academic progress. For example, a student athlete could be allowed one or two transfers for any reason before having to sit out a year of competition for subsequent transfers, in order to spend that year focused on demonstrating progress toward a degree. … ——— It’s clear Tim Sands (and VT and probably majority of the ACC schools) greatly prefers the Student Athlete model ove the Pro model. I think I might have said this before: if the P2 adopts a full pro model (players becomes employees), the ACC will position itself as an alternative traditional conference (one that aligned with the student athlete model and the NCAA)