My source is identical to this one:
http://www.d2messageboard.com/showthread...ost2053940

You misunderstood my "self interest" motivation. It's not skimming; this is non-elite athletics and there's not that kind of money to be had. It's the prospect of having the NCAA stamp of approval on your resume, that allows easier entrance to better NCAA jobs, attendance at NCAA conventions, networking with other NCAA professionals. This runs from trainers through coaches and administrators all the way to the Presidents Council. Getting hired for a head D1 job straight from an NAIA school is practically unheard of in the modern world. You have to be some level of NCAA to start with. The easiest way for one of these professionals is to be on staff at an NAIA school making the transition. It's very good for the professionals. Not so much for many of the schools they work for.

I don't think I've conflated anything. Certainly there are times when things don't work out as well as expected, but that's not the scenario I am referring to. I am referring to, basically, 1) incompetence and 2) self interest in disregard of what's best for the institution. Short of a legal trial or public confession, there's no way to tell which one is which in a given situation where one or the other is suspected. Two examples I cited earlier:

Rogers State: They publicly cited that the NCAA could be cheaper as a reason to go . I've looked through https://ope.ed.gov/athletics many times getting an idea of what the different costs are between the NCAA and NAIA and have found none where the NCAA was significantly cheaper, and tons where they are very significantly higher. If you found one that was cheaper, it would probably be because they dropped sports, not because they changed affiliation. https://ope.ed.gov/ is publicly available. Did they not bother to look what happened to other programs (incompetence)? Or did they know and ignore it (self interest)? We'll probably never know. The reality is that their budget has managed to stay flat since their transition, no doubt restrained by Oklahoma's fiscal situation, and have been mostly uncompetitive in their conference. They were very competitive in the Sooner conference before they started their transition. The statement that they would save money is false, and predictably false given the publicly available data.

Fresno Pacific: As I mentioned, there was a lot of deception involved with their campaign to go D2. They told faculty & staff that the GSAC and the NAIA wouldn't be around in 5 years, so they had to go "now". They also claimed that money would be saved. "Someone" engineered the campaign with a lot of anonymous buzz about going D2 that couldn't be pinned down. I asked the chair of the Board of Trustees myself if there was something to it, and he said "never in my lifetime" would they go D2. Yet it happened. After the transition, a similar anonymous campaign was launched around starting a softball team; it was discovered that it was engineered by the AD, who was promptly fired. You can conclude what you want about who was running the D2 campaign.

None of this is surprising for private schools. Yes, the ultimate decision makers are the president and board of trustees. But when a president's AD lobbies strongly favoring a membership transition, to deny it is a vote on non-confidence. It's the same way between the Trustees and the President; they hired him to do a job, and if he says they should go NCAA they're going to let him do his job, and hopefully hold him accountable later. Most of the trustees aren't going to be athletically inclined, and not be familiar with the NAIA brand why it's good for them. They DO often like being associated with the NCAA disc though. If it doesn't work out, the damage is done and it's doubly hard to convince them to go back very soon. It's an admission of failure many aren't willing to make so blatantly.

So yes, it's the president and trustees who make the decision, but it really comes down to the AD in many cases. And he and his staff's careers will get a boost by being NCAA. They might be long gone by the time anyone knows the full consequences for the school.