NCAA president Charlie Baker: Most college athletes don’t want to be employees

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA - MARCH 25: NCAA president Charlie Baker give a television interview during the game between the UCLA Bruins and the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament at Bon Secours Wellness Arena on March 25, 2023 in Greenville, South Carolina. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
By Nicole Auerbach and Chris Vannini
Apr 24, 2023

DALLAS — Speaking to a group of FBS athletic directors on Monday, NCAA president Charlie Baker candidly addressed some of the biggest issues facing college sports. Among those topics, Baker said he believes most college athletes do not want to become employees of their school, league or the NCAA.

“I don’t think you’ll find very many student-athletes who want to be employees,” Baker said at the LEAD1 Association’s annual spring meeting. “I haven’t found many, and there are a lot of really good reasons for that. Obviously, there’s a lot of traffic in the courts at this point about this issue these days, which is going to limit what I would choose to say about it. But I think student-athletes want to be student-athletes, and it’s up to us to figure out how to make that work for them in a variety of environments and in circumstances that are different.

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“Maybe there are ways to do this that are different for certain divisions and certain programs at certain levels. But if we’re really serious about being for student-athletes, I’m not sure that they would think that’s where they want to go.”

On state laws that challenge the NCAA’s authority

Baker, who began his tenure as NCAA president last month, has focused a great deal of his attention on issues surrounding name, image and likeness (NIL) and the NCAA’s continued push for federal legislation around the topic.

“Legislative and political debates are wildly unpredictable,” Baker said. “NIL creates the opportunity for a bipartisan — and what I would describe as sort of policy-based — solution, and that’s clearly what I’ve been hearing from most of the folks I talked to in Congress so far. Anytime you have a five-member majority Republican in the House and a two-member Democrat majority in the Senate, if you get a bipartisan piece of legislation that’s complicated done, then people, for the most part, think that it’s an honest and legitimate attempt to solve a national problem. As that relates to college athletics, it does a wonderful job of setting the table for whatever comes next.”

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Q&A with new NCAA president Charlie Baker: Conference parity, NIL and more

Baker was asked specifically about the number of recent bills and laws proposed in states such as Oklahoma and Arkansas that would ease NCAA restrictions around NIL, which could both pave the way for more direct athletic department involvement in securing deals for athletes and also explicitly supplant NCAA rules. He thinks that might help make the NCAA’s case to Congress, which has largely centered on the need for a national standard to supersede state laws.

“The challenge we face is, how do we deal with the fact that we’re gonna have certain states that are basically going to say what the NCAA thinks doesn’t matter?” Baker said. “That does make, in some respects, the idea of creating additional framework through federal legislation stronger than it would be otherwise. Because we have evidence it’s going to be hard to do this on a voluntary basis.”

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Baker addresses collectives

Baker pointed to three top-of-mind issues surrounding collectives, which are groups of boosters that facilitate NIL deals with athletes. Those issues include inducements in recruiting, schools directly affiliating with collectives, and the impact on Title IX, all of which Baker believes the NCAA is unable to tackle without federal legislation.

“If you’re going bring something that doesn’t have a ‘traditionally public purpose’ associated with it under tax-exempt umbrella, how does that get handled?” Baker said to the group. “I could argue both sides of that one and I’m not even a lawyer.”

The Title IX topic has been discussed many times since NIL was implemented. Because NIL operates in a free market outside of universities, it doesn’t fall under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in programs that receive public funding. But what does that mean when schools officially affiliate with a collective?

“The Office for Civil Rights would say, right now, that if a a collective is affiliated — and there will be a discussion on what that means — then they need to be spending as much money on women’s sports as they spend on a men’s sports and as much money on on women athletes as they spent on men athletes,” Baker said. “So I view all of those as legitimate issues that would have to be dealt with (by Congress) … I think at a minimum, and this came up in the survey work that (athletic directors) did, might have been one of the highest scores of all, which was that there does need to be a framework or regulatory model around collectives to begin with.”

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(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)

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