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Division I Board enacts four-year moratorium on accepting new members
August 09, 2007
The NCAA News
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The Division I Board of Directors has enacted a four-year moratorium on permitting institutions to begin the process of joining the division – an action that among other things will prevent a school from moving from another division into Division I or moving between its subdivisions until August 2011.



Although the division recently enacted new Football Bowl Subdivision criteria and established procedural steps to become a Division I member, standards for Division I institutional and conference membership were not reviewed.



The moratorium, which is effective immediately, does not affect 20 institutions that already have entered the seven-year Division I provisional-membership process for new NCAA members or the five-year process to move from Division II -- including institutions that currently are officially exploring Division I membership.



The moratorium also prevents institutions in Divisions II and III from seeking reclassification of a specific sport into Division I under multidivision-classification legislation, and prevents a new single-sport or multisport conference from achieving Division I membership until the moratorium ends.



The moratorium was endorsed by the NCAA Executive Committee Membership Working Group, a panel including representation from all three NCAA divisions that is studying the Association’s current three-division structure and considering steps to accommodate the NCAA’s continuing membership growth and related issues.



The panel suggested that a moratorium would give Division I an opportunity to re-evaluate criteria for achieving membership. The division’s current membership could consider during that period whether to revise standards for evaluating and granting membership to future provisional and/or reclassifying institutions – a step that could change Division I’s rate of growth.



The moratorium has Association-wide implications, because many of the institutions that recently have applied for Division I membership are reclassifying from Division II. The four-year length of the moratorium also fits a timeline established by the Executive Committee working group to propose and enact ways of managing an influx of new NCAA member institutions in Divisions II and III -- including possibly creating a fourth NCAA division or by subdividing Division III.