INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – For nearly two years, Todd Turner has worked to return academic integrity to college sports. For two months, David Berst has tried to rewrite recruiting rules.

Both are about to face a major test.

The NCAA Management Council meets Monday and Tuesday to consider sweeping proposals endorsed by NCAA president Myles Brand and designed to change the culture and image of intercollegiate athletics.

“Both are very critical areas for us,” said council chairwoman Christine Plonsky, women’s athletic director at Texas. “Common sense can prevail very, very easily. In the academic world, we’re moving into a new direction.”

Turner, the former athletic director at Vanderbilt, heads a committee that developed an ambitious proposal to penalize schools when student-athletes consistently perform poorly in the classroom. Berst, an NCAA vice president, oversees a panel examining recruiting rules. That group’s ideas also will be discussed this week.

If the proposal from Turner’s committee is passed by the council this week and approved by the NCAA Board of Directors on April 29, schools could be penalized as early as next year. The NCAA would look at graduation rates and general academic progress of athletes, assigning a score to each of the more than 6,000 Division I teams in all sports.

If a team then falls below a certain standard, which will be determined when data is collected from 2004-05, incremental penalties would include a warning letter, loss of scholarships, disqualification from NCAA tournaments and loss of money from NCAA championships. The penalty would increase each year, meaning a school would have to produce substandard results for four consecutive years to face the harshest penalty: loss of money.

If a school falls below the standard, and players who would have been academically ineligible the following year leave school, those scholarships would be lost for one year. Turner said there would be no limit on how many scholarships could be lost, although there would be an appeals process.

“I will be pleased when there is evidence that behaviors have changed and our student-athletes are more like students than professionals,” Turner said. “This is one of the most significant things we’ve tried to do to make academics important.”

Turner’s committee also wanted to reward schools that exceeded the standards. Adding scholarships and increasing on-campus visits were both considered before being ruled out. Now it appears any reward primarily would be additional publicity for the team.

Plonsky said the biggest concern she’s heard from schools, coaches and athletic directors is that it’s not clear where the academic bar will be set.

Still, the package is expected to pass.

“It’s hard not to support academic reform. We all feel an obligation,” Plonsky said.

The other major issue this week is recruiting.

Berst led a task force appointed by Brand in February after highly publicized scandals at Colorado and Miami.

The task force has made several recommendations to restrict over-the-top wining and dining of recruits. It also asked universities to implement their own policies.

Berst, the NCAA’s former head of enforcement, said if the schools put a policy in writing, the NCAA could then hold the school accountable to those policies.

Additional measures could be proposed at the Management Council’s July meeting in Baltimore with the hope that new recruiting standards would be in place by this fall. Berst will make the recommendations this week, but a vote is not expected.

The task force ruled out stricter changes that could have eliminated paid visits by recruits completely. But the panel might reconsider cutting the number of paid visits a recruit can take before the final proposal is completed.

“This has exactly the right kind of teeth,” Berst said. “It’s the manner in which you show the teeth that’s important. If we have institutions help us design things, it seems to have a better chance of actually changing the culture.”

AP-ES-04-18-04 1532EDT