Former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker formally replaces Mark Emmert as the NCAA’s president Wednesday, and during a roughly 30-minute interview with USA TODAY Sports earlier this week, what Baker didn’t say was just as notable as what he did say.
Amid what he described as a listening tour of college sports stakeholders that already has been underway and will continue during his first 100 days, Baker did not dismiss out of hand the concept of college athletes becoming employees of their school. He also did not adhere to the idea that the association’s only path to clarifying its most urgent underlying issues is the passage of new federal laws.
Those notions have been articles of faith for Emmert and many other college sports leaders as Emmert’s more-than-12-year run with the NCAA has been drawing to a close. His departure also ends an era in which the association has been led on a permanent basis by either a former college president or former college sports administrator.
In addition to his background in politics, Baker enters from the worlds of business, healthcare and government administration. He played basketball for Harvard, his wife was a gymnast for Northwestern and his sons played Division III football.
He inherits an association facing pressure on numerous sides regarding the environment surrounding college athletes’ dealings to make money from their name, image and likeness. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Alston antitrust case and the NCAA’s ...
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