NCAA President Myles Brand Dies at 67

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.