After a nearly year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, NCAA president Myles Brand died today. He was 67.In 2003, Brand was named as the first-ever university president to take over the NCAA's top job. Among his many ventures, he made a significant push to get collegiate athletics more academically focused. He believed the NCAA sports -- namely football and basketball -- were too much like professional sports and he wanted to change the culture, using the phrase, "turn down the volume."
Brand is most famous, though, for being the administrator who helped take down Bob Knight at Indiana University.
In May of 2000, Brand -- then-president of Indiana University -- instituted what was called a "zero tolerance" policy toward Knight and his behavior. A few months later, Brand fired Knight for violating the policy. Students rushed to Brand's house on campus that evening and burned him in effigy.
Later, Brand would tell news outlets Knight's larger-than-life basketball persona made Indiana more of a basketball factory than an academic institution in the public eye and this needed to change. Brand left the school two years later, before becoming president of the NCAA in January of 2003.
In January of this year, Brand was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The NCAA has yet to decide how they will search for his successor and there are no clear rules of succession in place should the current president perish.
Brand is survived by his wife and one son.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Miles Brand died from pancreatic cancer - well that was the official version of the story.
We know God Himself reached down and choked the life from that frittering popinjay masquerading as a man.
Miles Brand never played an organized sport his entire life. Well, he did manage to carry the ball sacks of the heavyweight wrestlers at his high school. But that's only because he lost a bet. However, after finding he enjoyed the experience, he continued to volunteer as a sack-carrier, even though it placed him between the knobby knees of the wrestlers. He was forced to cease and desist under orders of the Jesuit priests, who preferred to reserve that delicate task for themselves.
Miles Brand rose to power as a pipsqueak. A mouth-piece for liberal sh*t-eating administrators.
Miles Brand appointed himself head nazi of the sporting world.
May his bones be dug up and scavenged by un-earthly creatures.
His image will be one spat upon and pissed on by all Good Sporting Humans - Especially those former NCAA athletes whose images he stole to sell to corporations in order to fill his filthy mother-f*cking pockets.
I forgot - He sure had a winning, winsome smile!
And in these fatuous days, that'll take you miles!