Steller column: Deep in Old Main, let's hope an NCAA revolution is brewing

What I’m about to tell you is a secret in the key of satire, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it between us.

When Ann Weaver Hart was president of the University of Arizona, she, of course, had Old Main remodeled and made it the UA’s administration building. What made that project so expensive? Not extravagant luxury. No, actually it was a secure room in the heart of the building. No windows. Soundproof walls. Encrypted communications. Secured entry using iris scans.

Shhhh.

And the reason we haven’t seen much of UA President Robert Robbins lately? He’s been in there, planning his response to the scandals engulfing UA athletics. Talking, planning, plotting.

You see, Robbins and the university’s athletic director, David Heeke, may seem to be hiding from a scandal, but actually they are in a great position to carry out a revolution.

Both Robbins and Heeke are new to the university and have no responsibility for the misbehavior and even crimes that may have occurred in the basketball and football programs. They’re free to react as they wish, within the bounds of their career aspirations.

I have it on good information from sources who don’t even have names that they are taking that freedom and using it. Apparently, former UA basketball star Steve Kerr and a cabal of insiders including Robbins and Heeke have conspired in that war-room to upend the NCAA’s antiquated rules and the NCAA itself.

Kerr has convinced them, I’m told, that the way the NCAA operates is impure because it prevents athletes who can make money off their names from doing so. Kerr favors the Olympic model, he’s said, in which international athletes can be paid for product endorsements and similar deals while retaining their eligibility to compete in the Olympics.

It goes further.

The NBA’s one-and-done rule that has perverted college basketball? It’s done. Once the Robbins Revolution occurs, the star players will no longer be forced to attend a university for a year and pretend to be students before trying for the NBA.

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Agents are also on the Old Main agenda. Basketball players can’t hire agents under current rules, but the agents tend to find a way to get involved anyway in the hopes of scoring the player’s business later on, when he’s out of college. They act as go-betweens, shuttling information, favors and money, if the indictments against Emanuel “Book” Richardson and other basketball figures are to be believed. The cabal would reverse that by legalizing hiring agents.

But perhaps the most revolutionary move being plotted in Old Main’s Secure Room? Secession. The Big 5 athletic conferences will take their two money-making sports, football and basketball, and remove them from the NCAA, setting up an entirely new system for governance of college athletics. The sports would still be affiliated with the universities, perhaps spun off as subsidiaries, and they could still pay for the universities’ other sports as they do now, but they wouldn’t be bound by NCAA rules.

We haven’t seen plotting like what’s going on in Old Main since the Bolsheviks squelched the Mensheviks in 1917.

Unless my non-named sources are wrong. And there is no secured room with iris scanners. If that’s the case, then really what I’ve described above is simply what I hope is happening.

What I hope for is that Robbins and Heeke are paying attention to the voices promoting reform in Arizona and around the country — not just Kerr but LeBron James, who on Tuesday called the NCAA “corrupt” and said he doubted he would have his kids participate in college athletics.

Even if I didn’t have secret sources in a secure room, I did talk with Lynn Nadel, the UA’s faculty president, who said he shares my feeling and that of many people around the country that the moment is right for change in collegiate athletics, starting here.

“I would love to see this university take the lead on transforming the relationship between big-time athletics and universities,” he said. “On the campus on the whole there’s just a general feeling of frustration that this athletic stuff is wagging the dog.”

So, the time is right and the place is right, since Tucson is in the middle of the maelstrom now. The people are right, too. As talented newcomers, Robbins and Heeke have an opportunity to push overdue reforms.

Even if there is no secure room in the heart of Old Main where they can conspire.