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In-Depth

Mark Emmert on …

Retirement

“I don’t have anything planned because I’ve been focused on this job. I’ve been approached about a couple of possibilities. I’m going to do something. I don’t want to fully retire. I want to do some writing. Beyond that, I want to do some academic things. I’ll do something, for sure.”

Federal intervention in college athletics

“College sports were never the domain of Congress; it was never seen as the domain of state legislatures. Now, all of a sudden, everybody is in that space. In fact, for some of the issues facing college sports now, having Congress engaged is not just useful, but it’s essential. There are a number of problems where the only solution is to get some change in Congress. … We have 30 different states with competing laws in the NIL space, including some states that have proposed pay-for-play models that would trigger employment status for athletes. We’ve got serial lawsuits around employment status and pay-for-play, and absent some congressional intervention to set the landscape, it’s going to be very hard to continue college sports as we know it. College sports aren’t going to die. That would be ridiculous to say. You’re always going to have football and basketball, and they’ll always be popular. But it could really hurt the Olympic sports. It has the potential to really blow up the model that supports half a million athletes. That’s very real.”

Whether he’d take this job again

“Yeah. No question about that. I’m a huge fan of college sports. I’ve been on dozens and dozens of college campuses and talked to hundreds of athletes, and you really want to hear what’s challenging them and what’s working for them. A vast majority of them are having really great experiences, and I still believe in the power of that. So, I love the job. Is it hard and do I wish I did some things differently? Of course. I’d take this job over again in a minute.”

What he’d do differently

“I came into this job anxious to get a lot of things done and had strong agreement from the leadership about what needed to be done and ‘by golly, we’re going to get this done.’ Then you find out the machinery is a little stickier than it should be. I would have benefited from understanding the machinery better. From a communications standpoint, we would have benefited from just explaining what the NCAA is and just pounded away on that message. I assumed everybody knew and they didn’t. … People have no idea how a decision is made or how it happens. Or you hear someone launching at the NCAA, even though I know their AD just voted for the thing that person is screaming about.”

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