It's only the first month of the new year and the NCAA has already created an uproar.

Starting in 1991 and 1992, the American South and Big South will qualify for automatic berths for the NCAA basketball tournament. Since the NCAA cannot increase the number of automatic bids given to conference champions until 1998, a pair of other conferences will lose their automatic bids.

The Ivy League, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and other weaker conference could find themselves out of an automatic bid to the tourney.

The NCAA Executive Committee has already made a tentative decision on the problem of deciding who loses the bid. It may choose conferences each year the same way the Division I men's basketball committee selects at-large teams--on the basis of a conference's strength, and its teams' records against outside competition, including wins against top-50 teams.

Pleasure Cruise

This decision may force the Ivy League and other weaker conferences to schedule more top-20 teams each year.

"I think it's wrong," Harvard Sports Information Director Frank Cicero said. "Why take two of the conferences out. They should increase the automatic berths to 32. [Losing the bid] will take a lot away from Ivy basketball."

It wouldn't be a pretty sight if Harvard had to play schools like Duke, North Carolina, and Arizona week in and week out.

Proposition 48

The NCAA has also approved a plan to toughen Proposition 48, the rule which prevents athletes with substandard academic records from playing varsity sports for one year.

The new plan will deny athletic scholarships to incoming freshmen who don't meet the NCAA's minimum academic standards.

Athletes who fell below the Proposition 48 standards--which include minimum scores of 700 on the SAT or 15 on the ACT--were previously eligible for scholarships but were required to sit out their freshman season and retain only three years of eligibility.

Non-qualifiers can receive athletic scholarships from their sophomore year on, as long as they achieve the required 2.0 grade point average in the classroom during their first year.

"The goal was to be comparable with the original intent of Proposition 48," SEC Commissioner Harvey Schiller said. "Passage of the proposal will send a strong message to secondary schools."

"It doesn't preclude other forms of financial aid or admission to college," Schiller said.

Quote of the Week: "If you're a teacher and all your students were flunking, you just can't say your students were bad students. If you're a doctor and your patients keep dying, they weren't all terminal."--Harvard men's basketball Coach Peter Roby after Harvard dropped three games on the road over winter break.