NACDA Directors' Cup
The NACDA Directors' Cup, known for sponsorship reasons as the NACDA Learfield Directors' Cup or simply as the Directors' Cup, is an award given annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics to the colleges and universities in the United States with the most success in collegiate athletics. Points for the NACDA Directors' Cup are based on order of finish in various championships sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) or, in the case of Division I Football, media-based polls. A first-place finish in  a sport earns 100 points, second place 90 points, third place 85 points, and lesser values for lower finishes. The award originated in 1993 and was presented to NCAA Division I schools only. In 1995 it was extended to Division II, Division III, and NAIA schools as well, then extended further to junior colleges in 2011 based on standings from the NATYCAA Cup. Each division receives its own award. The University of North Carolina won the award in its inaugural year, but then Stanford University won the Division I award for 25 straight years until the streak was broken in  2020–21 by the University of Texas. In Division II, UC Davis won six of the first eight awards, but its athletic program moved to Division I in 2003 and Grand Valley State won the award the following eight years. Williams College has had the most success in Division III, having won the award 21 of the 23 times it has been awarded for that division. The NAIA division was similarly dominated by Simon Fraser University of British Columbia in its early years, but in 2002, SFU transferred several of its sports programs to Canada's college athletics federation, then known  as Canadian Interuniversity Sport and now as U Sports. SFU has since become a full member of NCAA Division II. From 2004–05 to 2011–12, Azusa Pacific University assumed the mantle at the NAIA level, winning eight consecutive championships before moving to NCAA Division II in the 2012–13 season. Oklahoma City University has been the most successful school since that year, with three Directors' Cups. For two year colleges, Iowa Central Community College has been the most successful school, winning five of the nine titles. The physical award is a Waterford crystal trophy. Prior to 2003, the sponsor of the NACDA  Directors' Cup was retail merchandiser Sears, and the award was known as the Sears Cup. Beginning in the 2003–04 season, the sponsor was the United States Sports Academy. In 2007–08, Learfield Sports assumed the sponsorship of the Directors' Cup. Learfield Sports rebranded to Learfield IMG College in 2016 and to simply Learfield in 2021. Scoring. See chart for further breakdown of scoring. Past scoring system. From the creation of the award until the 2017–18 season the scoring was as follows: Criticism. The scoring structure has been criticized due to the number of sports counted per division. Although the number of  sports counted in the scoring is based on the average number of sports sponsored by a team in that division, certain schools offer many more or many less sports than that. For example, Stanford's dominance at the Division I level is largely attributed to them sponsoring 36 sports teams, the most in Division I outside of the Ivy League, which does not grant athletic scholarships. This gives Stanford many more opportunities to win titles than most other schools, especially considering that many of the sports Stanford sponsors are not played by very many other schools, all but guaranteeing a  substantial number of points for the few schools that do. Multiple suggestions have been made to change the scoring system. Some of the most popular of these include making each sport worth a proportional number of points to the number of schools that compete in it, to get rid of the limit on the number of sports counted then divide a school's total points by the number of sports it sponsors, and to count the median number of teams per division instead of the average (the median number of teams at a Division I school, for example, is 16 ; substantially lower than the 19 sports that are counted). However, none of these suggestions have ever been seriously considered by NACDA.