Message Impossible? NCAA PR Tries Turning Page on Enforcement
Sisyphus had his heavy boulder to deal with. Tim Buckley has the NCAA’s rulebook.
Buckley, a longtime political staffer for former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, was tapped by Baker to take over the NCAA’s public outreach efforts.
His steep, if not Sisyphean, challenge: Redirect the conversation about the NCAA’s much-maligned enforcement duties while emphasizing stories about the athletes it is supposed to serve.
“A stunning upset or breakout performance could happen at any minute in college sports—it’s why we all watch,” Buckley said. “What we try to do as a communications team is work within the bylaws to shed as much light on the regulatory decisions as possible and not get bogged down in that work, because every day there are student-athletes doing something amazing that should be celebrated and promoted.”
On March 1, Buckley was named senior vice president of external affairs, a newly created position that incorporated the role formerly occupied by Bob Williams, who had served as the NCAA’s senior VP of communications since 2010.
Previously, Buckley held positions throughout Baker’s campaign and administration; he eventually took over as chief of staff late last year, in the waning days of the governor’s second term when much of the the office was fleeing to find work elsewhere.
“It was the coolest job I had up to that point,” Buckley said. “One day the governor came into my office and said, ‘I am serious about this NCAA thing.’ And I said, ‘What NCAA thing?’”
Without another firm offer in place, Buckley jumped into what he now says is his coolest job—changing how the governing body of college sports is perceived.
Out of the NCAA’s 500 staffers, 27 currently make up its communications department, which Buckley recalls as beaten down by an unyielding string of unfavorable coverage during the 12-year tenure of former president Mark Emmert.
“I have been there, in state government, when something is happening and you are just flat-flooded, and you feel that you can’t get out of the rut,” Buckley told Sportico. “I think there was a lot of that with folks at the office, very much looking forward to an opportunity to reset with Charlie coming in, and so far, it has been great.”
Though new to college sports, Buckley says he nonetheless brought a highly applicable background to his current role, having toiled for years facing down Beantown’s press corps.
“Any time you have a transition in leadership, it is an opportunity to do a reset on all kinds of things,” said Buckley, who like his boss, has remained in Boston. “I thought it was important as much as possible to reset the relationship with members of media.”
This is not the first time the NCAA has sought to reboot its media relations.
After Emmert took over for Myles Brand in 2010, the association had touted the beginning of a new, more open relationship with the press and, by extension, the public. And indeed, a few months into Emmert’s term as president, The New York Times took note of what ostensibly was the NCAA’s new approach to scrutiny. In October 2011, the organization even invited select reporters to its Indianapolis headquarters to participate in a mock “enforcement experience,” which achieved some glowing reviews, including a Sports Illustrated writer’s proclamation that the NCAA had achieved its goal of “demystifying and humanizing” infractions enforcement.
The current regime is undertaking similar outreach efforts. During a telephone interview in late August, Buckley suggested that his participation in this very article showed the NCAA’s latest rapprochement. He also hoped to promote its new, in-house PR initiative to promote five of its fall sport offerings aside from FBS football. It could be a precursor to a new normal, as big-time football looks increasingly likely to break off from the NCAA in the not-too-distant future.
“We are trying to use our resources more intelligently on the communications staff and try to redirect it from some of the maybe more inward-focused stuff and use some of their time and effort to support these championships,” Buckley said.
By more inward-focused stuff, he means the NCAA’s punitive function. One of Buckley’s initial steps was to relegate almost all enforcement news from the NCAA’s primary Twitter/X account (@NCAA), with its nearly 2 million followers, to the organization’s @NCAA_PR account, which has only around 66,000 followers.
“We are not going to hide NCAA infractions from the media,” Buckley said. “You have to meet it head on and do as much explaining beforehand, so people have a good basis of facts before we are talking about why a certain decision is made. That being said, there was also just an opportunity to better integrate the communications office with what the association does best.”
As it approached the current academic year, the NCAA allocated $500,000 towards creating original social media content—with a particular focus on TikTok and Instagram Reels—for women’s volleyball, cross country, men’s and women’s soccer, and the lower-tiered FCS football.
Within the first three weeks of August, the NCAA’s digital team had visited eight college campuses and, according to its own figures, generated more than 14 million views on social—a 1,632% increase over the same time last year. The plan is to hit a total of 43 college campuses by the end of November. A corresponding earned-media strategy likewise centers around Baker going on location to schools in an attempt to generate uplifting feature stories about athletes thriving in their college experience.
On Aug. 30, Baker attended women’s volleyball day at Nebraska, where a record-setting crowd of over 92,000 fans packed Memorial Stadium to watch games featuring the Huskers, Nebraska-Omaha, Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State College.
“This is a big statement being made here today,” Baker said during a pre-game, courtside interview posted on the NCAA’s various social channels. He pointed out that next year, the media rights for the association’s non-basketball championships were out to bid, and that there was already a clamor among potential partners over volleyball, which has exploded in popularity.
If only every day could be volleyball day for the NCAA.
But the NCAA is still largely an enforcement agency, and soon enough, that part of the job would again come under the microscope with its ruling in the case of North Carolina football transfer Tez Walker—which set off a two-month war of words between the association and a member institution.
The NCAA Division I Council voted earlier in the year to update and tighten its transfer guidelines, denying two-time transfers immediate eligibility unless they could demonstrate compelling physical or mental health reasons or off-the-field “exigent circumstances that clearly necessitate” the choosing of a new school. Walker, who transferred twice but played games at only one of his previous schools, sought NCAA permission for immediate eligibility at UNC, citing mental health reasons and the desire to be closer to his grandmother.
Despite this, the NCAA’s committee for legislative relief initially denied his waiver on Aug. 8, then rejected his appeal on Sept. 7, prompting Tar Heels coach Mack Brown to release a scathing public statement that the NCAA had lost his faith in its ability to govern FBS football. A separate statement from UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham echoed that sentiment.
In response, the association pushed back with its own statement from members of the D-I Board of Directors, who reported that committee members were subjected to “violent-and possibly criminal-threats,” and castigated Brown and other UNC officials for riling up their fanbase. Outside of an infractions ruling, it was a rare act of public condemnation from the NCAA to one of its members–and one that didn’t necessarily engender a lot of sympathy, with one Washington Post op-ed writer arguing the association’s “sordid history … voided the benefit of any doubt.”
When asked by Sportico, Buckley said he didn’t have much detail to add to the previous statement the NCAA made.
“Just about everyone recognized the gravity of the issue when committee members started getting such violent threats,” Buckley said. “I and the NCAA communications team strive to provide as much information as possible, given personal privacy constraints, to increase transparency around important issues like transfer rules and NIL.”
A decade of upheaval in the NCAA helped usher in the association’s current PR predicament. The Ed O’Bannon court case against the association and EA Sports cast a harsh light on NCAA amateurism rules, especially against a backdrop of skyrocketing coaching salaries and TV revenues.
In October 2011, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch penned his seminal essay for The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” that vividly brought the moral argument against amateurism to a wider audience. For the NCAA, it would all be downhill from there: In 2014, Judge Claudia Wilken made her initial ruling in favor of O’Bannon, agreeing that the NCAA rules violated federal antitrust laws, and setting off a series of additional lawsuits and adverse court rulings. Then came the legislative effort in California to codify the publicity rights of college athletes, touching off a series of state-based NIL bills that directly challenged the authority of the NCAA.
In November 2019, just around the time the California bill was being signed into law, the NCAA hired Gina Lehe to serve as managing director of communications. Having previously worked for the College Football Playoff and Rose Bowl, Lehe says her mandate was to challenge the organization’s conventional ways of messaging. And there was a lot to challenge.
The pandemic only accentuated how outmoded parts of the NCAA’s messaging operation had become. Lehe cited the NCAA’s quarterly print magazine, Champions, which began publishing in 2008 until it was the victim of COVID-related budget cuts in 2020—arguably long after its usefulness.
“You have people operating in a machine and checking boxes,” Lehe said, “but then you have progress moving at a much more rapid pace.”
Lehe acknowledges that the job of defending the NCAA is stressful, and that the pandemic took a particular toll on her department’s mental health.
“In the role we execute as communicators,” she said, “we are often taking messaging, or we are often pushing notifications on decisions that are made by our members and committees, and we are not going to win the day.”
And yet, even if it at times seems like a lost cause, Lehe believes there is value in continuing to “educate” about enforcement.
“I don’t expect media members or anyone to applaud difficult decisions,” she said, “but if we have done our job in explaining, I do think people will trust us.”
To that end, at Lehe’s suggestion, the NCAA decided in February to invite two reporters—the The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach and Sports Illustrated‘s Pat Forde—to attend a regularly scheduled meeting of the Committee on Infractions in Las Vegas.
On Feb. 28, both publications ran stories that offered looks “inside” a process reviled by a cross-section of civil rights historians, antitrust economists and face-painted college sports fans alike.
“It played out exactly how we hoped and anticipated, and now, where we are today, we have built some really strong relationships,” Lehe said. “We were trying to be really clear both to the committee and the reporters that we want to be partners in this communication journey, not obstructionists to the process.”
While the Tez Walker situation led many Tar Heels fans and sports media to fume anew about the NCAA’s rules—and defense thereof—Forde, for one, seized upon UNC’s “bravura outrage performance” as the greater offense.
“Media members joined in to carry Carolina’s water,” Forde wrote in a Sept. 13 SI column. “This was the easiest PR ploy imaginable, given the NCAA’s long history of botched and inconsistent decisions and its nameless/faceless bureaucratic aura.”
Buckley said last week the plan going forward is to find more opportunities to bring media behind the curtain, though he would prefer to keep the focus on the field.
Still, in the end, the Tez Walker saga proved to be a net publicity negative for the NCAA, which eventually ruled the player eligible earlier this month.
On Oct. 5, Baker and Morehead announced that the association had received new information that qualified Walker to participate. “It is unfortunate that UNC failed to provide this important information previously,” read the NCAA’s statement, which was re-posted on @NCAA_PR. That tweet quickly became one of the most-viewed the association had produced this year, though its amplifiers were largely hostile.
And so, the next day, Tim Buckley and the NCAA’s communications department were left to push the boulder back up the hill again.
