O’Neil: Charlie Baker as NCAA president will be more of the same for college athletics

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS - MARCH 30: Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker speaks to the press at the Hynes Convention Center FEMA Mass Vaccination Site on March 30, 2021 in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Walensky recently said she had a sense of "impending doom" as the rate of coronavirus infection has recently been rising across the U.S. (Photo by Erin Clark-Pool/Getty Images)
By Dana O'Neil
Dec 15, 2022

Every once in a while the last few months, during a random conversation about something entirely unrelated, I’d be reminded that the NCAA still needed a president. Truly felt like a light-bulb moment. “Oh, right, that job is still open, isn’t it?” Which can be interpreted in plenty of ways. That no one missed Mark Emmert, most obviously. But also how feckless the entire concept of NCAA president had become.

Advertisement

It wasn’t entirely fantastic to imagine the NCAA downsizing, with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey’s transformation committee reimagining an NCAA without a president.

Instead, the NCAA has named Emmert’s replacement — Charlie Baker, the outgoing Republican governor of Massachusetts. This is the NCAA’s idea of out-of-the-box thinking. As transformations go, opting for a politician over a university president is like splitting the last hair on a bald man’s scalp.

Aside from his white-collar job title, Baker otherwise looks exactly like the other men — and save for two years when Judith Sweet stood at the helm, it’s always men — who’ve held the position. He hits all of the W columns, and no, that’s not wins. He’s White, well-educated and wealthy, thanks to his job running a healthcare company. (He’s also about to get wealthier. His government job paid just $185,000; Emmert made $2.99 million.) His athletics background is negligible — he played junior varsity basketball at Harvard, and his wife and two children played college athletics. He did sign the Massachusetts sports betting bill into law.

In other words, he likely has about as much knowledge of how college sports operate at the granular level as Bob Huggins has about writing healthcare policy.

The NCAA chose him for one reason: not to transform the NCAA, but to protect it. The challenges are coming from all sides — from power-conference leaders searching for autonomy to coaches sick of antiquated rules. But mostly it comes from the courts, where the Alston case forced a day of reckoning with the entire NCAA structure. Rather than organize and prepare for the NIL train everyone else saw coming, the NCAA chose to fight it, and when it lost turned to Congress for some help. When Emmert stepped down, the NCAA made it abundantly clear that it believed it needed someone with connections in Washington D.C. to navigate the NIL waters.

Advertisement

Which is where, presumably, Baker comes in (though one Massachusetts political observer familiar with Baker’s career told The Athletic that Baker has “absolutely no clout” in D.C.; that his own Republican party views him as a RINO, while Democrats are simply disinterested.) What he can and can’t do remains to be seen; what the NCAA wants him to do, however, is clear. The organization that preaches student-athlete welfare out one side of its mouth is whispering for an assist to halt the NIL train out the other side. Holding back athletes? Not terribly transformative, is it?

There is so much wrong with the NCAA right now. Yes, it needs to at least come up with universal rules to govern NIL. It also needs to figure out how to manage sports more equitably, to stop making one rule fit all rulebooks. The transfer portal population is larger than some small countries. Its enforcement process is more of a disaster than ever — a very high bar to leap. The IARP has essentially castrated the entire thing, refusing to mete out punishment on head coaches just as the NCAA preps for the elimination of rebuttable presumptions for coaches’ infractions come January.

And yet the NCAA has decided the No. 1 job criteria for its president is someone who can schmooze politicos and manage the NIL process that threatens the NCAA’s existence. Frankly, the public doesn’t care about it. Coaches are learning to manage it. All in all, college athletes are making money, and the world has not crumbled. There are, frankly, bigger fish to fry.

It’s probably unfair to damn the man on the first day on the job. Perhaps his outsider’s perspective will prove refreshing and much-needed. He generally polls as a popular governor, which is no easy task. Maybe people will actually like Baker, which would be a marked improvement on his predecessor.

But Emmert always liked to remind people, especially when the fire got too close to his expensive loafers, that the NCAA president is merely representative of the “membership organization.’’ A figurehead, if you will. Except he never recognized that the NCAA president figurehead more closely resembles a bobblehead, the head so big, bloated and out of proportion to the body that it can only nod its head ineffectively.

Advertisement

There are so many good foot soldiers in the NCAA who work tirelessly for the betterment of college athletes and athletics. Who, simply put, get it. The problem long has been — but underscored with Emmert — that the person sitting at the top didn’t, his view blocked by the ivory gilding his tower.

Maybe Charlie Baker will get it. But right now, it’s hard to see how another 3W man can be considered even a little bit transformative.

(Photo: Erin Clark-Pool / Getty Images)

Get all-access to exclusive stories.

Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.

Dana O'Neil

Dana O’Neil, a senior writer for The Athletic, has worked for more than 25 years as a sports writer, covering the Final Four, the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals and NHL playoffs. She has worked previously at ESPN and the Philadelphia Daily News. She is the author of three books, including "The Big East: Inside the Most Entertaining and Influential Conference in College Basketball History." Follow Dana on Twitter @DanaONeilWriter