It’s an odd position for an accomplished architect to find himself, but Clemson University President James Barker has become a symbol for deconstruction in the NCAA.

Almost everywhere else you look, college football is transforming itself through expansion of one sort or another.

Players are taking seriously an evolution from a time when there were no athletic scholarships 80 years ago to coalescing in groups, asking for a slice of the money flowing in to conferences and schools from previously inconceivable billion-dollar broadcast deals; coaches salaries have to risen to more than $5 million a year for the few at the top and assistants coaches at some schools are making more than $1 million a year; schools are breaking out of traditional conferences for new opportunities, more broadcast money and bigger national exposure.

While all of that has been associated with a kind of bigger, better, more model, NCAA President Mark Emmert tasked Barker with the fundamental and weighty challenge of reducing the size of the unwieldy rules book that all coaches across the country live by.

And Barker wasn’t asked to shorten a sentence here or there, he was asked to oversee a group that would streamline the rules substantially. Not a complete tear down, but close.

Have you ever made up your mind to clean out the garage only to get in there, find yourself confused and conflicted and then give up?

Take that experience and magnify it by hundreds to reflect the concerns of athletic departments large and small across the country in urban and rural settings, from minimal academic standards to high academics standards.

Just reduce the size and confusion of all the rules in a way that will make everyone happy, that’s all.

“There are a lot of ways to go,” Barker said last week, “but I’m not sure there is one way to do it that will please everyone all the time in all situations.

“We are all going to have to reevaluate how we do our business.”

That might be the key phrase for Barker’s working group which, earlier this month, produced a 12-page report that was expected to form the structure for a more concise book of rules with more emphasis on individual institutional accountability and less on the central office of the NCAA in Indianapolis.

“What we’re doing will change things, there’s no question about that,” Barker said, “people like me will no longer be able to say, ‘There’s nothing I can do, we have to do it the way Big Brother wants in Indianapolis,’ we will be taking responsibility for our institution; the days of passing the buck are over.”

That’s because the report Barker’s working group forwarded to the NCAA on suggested rules changes included the elimination of a rule that previously required boosters to donate money through an administrative screening committee. The donor has always had the right to ask that money go to a specific area such as new facilities, coaches’ salaries, whatever it may have been.

At that point, the institution would deliberate and either agree with the request or informed the donor that there were other needs the university had to meet and the money would have to go to those areas. The donor could then decide whether to still contribute the money or not.

That rule was eliminated, which alarmed some academics because it looked as though donors could make direct contributions to the athletic department.

“We heard some things, but people are seeing where this is headed now, and I don’t sense there’s a panic going on at all,” said Kevin Lennon, vice-president of academic and membership affairs at the NCAA. “What will happen is that institutions will set up committees in their athletic departments that will screen the donors in concert with the goals of the university.”

The backdrop to all of this is that donors have always approached schools with money they want spent in a variety of ways and an institutional screening committee has always approved, denied or in some way modified the requests.

“Boosters have offered money for travel to events, for institutional employees – not just coaches – to attend speaking engagements, they want their money spent in innumerable ways,” Lennon said, “and that won’t change.”

What will change is that boosters will be screened by an athletic department committee instead of going through a general fund committee and then being forwarded to athletics, as barker said, the days of passing the buck are over.

“People should also know about violations,” Barker said. “In this format, athletic departments have to be responsible and accountable to the mission of the University and if that doesn’t happen, if the booster money gets you in trouble, you’re going to be in much bigger trouble than before.

“At the end of it all, nothing has really changed in the sense of boosters making donations,” he said. “It’s just that athletics now takes on some new accountability.”

It makes sense, like some of the other proposals from Barker’s group such as allowing unlimited texting and tweeting by coaches with recruits and allowing coaches to discuss players they are recruiting while those players are being recruited.

That last one was suggested in this space a month ago. Newspapers, broadcasters and all manner of Internet websites report the names of players schools are recruiting, what’s the point in pretending otherwise?

Barker’s group seems to have made real progress with reducing the maze of NCAA rules, and the concept of avoiding the “central government” of the head office in Indianapolis and putting the burden on schools to police their own seems only right.

For a guy who made a professional career of building things up to meet new realities, Barker has shown he has a knack for deconstruction as well.

In the process, he’s putting the NCAA rule book through a much-needed rewrite that will frame the next generation of behavior by college football programs.

Let’s hope maturation is part of the new world of NCAA rules.