NCAA’s next president will be Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which has struggled to manage the changing landscape of college sports amid rapid change with endorsement deals, major media contracts and conference reshuffles, on Thursday named Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker its new president.

Baker has been governor of Massachusetts since 2015 and his second term expires in January. He will take over as president of the NCAA in March, the same month the organization hosts its signature Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Baker succeeds Mark Emmert, who will serve as a consultant to the NCAA through June.

Baker, 66, has some familiarity with college sports. He played basketball at Harvard, including a season with the varsity team in 1977-78. His wife, Lauren, was a gymnast at Northwestern, and their two sons played Division III football.

But Baker has not worked in the sport in any capacity; he has worked in government and the health industry throughout his professional life. Still, the NCAA needed “a leader with different skills,” said Mary-Beth A. Cooper, the president of Springfield College in Massachusetts, who served on the search committee.

“I have to say when I was first approached about this, my first reaction was that I wasn’t exactly what you would call a traditional candidate,” Baker said at a news conference Thursday. He added that “the massive transition that comes with policy and government and law and regulation” led him to believe he could handle the role.

While an unexpected and non-traditional choice for the job, his government experience could help the NCAA navigate a time when its power in Washington and the U.S. statehouses has seemingly waned and its advocacy of federal legislation to change its business model. to protect against legal challenges have sometimes failed.

Lawmakers at many levels have become increasingly vocal about making major changes to the fundamentals of college sports, where athletes are generally only compensated by universities for the cost of participation. Endorsement revenues, known as name, image, and likeness deals, are settled separately between athletes and outside companies, and the NCAA only capitulated on the issue after several states passed laws giving student-athletes the new way to make money from their fame.

“The president of the NCAA must be able to balance conflicting priorities, inspire a shared vision and create a broad sense of trust,” said former Duke and NBA basketball player Grant Hill, who served on the search committee. . He added, “Charlie Baker has demonstrated the type of results-driven, two-pronged approach we need to empower student-athletes well-being, realize the opportunities and overcome the challenges facing the NCAA”

In December 2021, Baker, a Republican, announced he would not be running for re-election, saying he would focus on recovering from the pandemic rather than campaigning. Despite being a Republican, Baker regularly challenged President Donald J. Trump by saying that Trump was hurting the party. Baker said he left his presidential ballots blank in 2016 and 2020.

Baker was more popular in his home state among Democrats and independents, and Massachusetts Republican Party chairman Jim Lyons suggested that Baker chose not to run again because he was “appalled” by Trump’s endorsement of Geoff Diehl as the Republican candidate. Baker denied that was the case, and Maura Healey, a Democrat, handily defeated Diehl in November.

“I can state unequivocally that this was not on my mind when I made the decision not to seek re-election a year ago,” Baker said Thursday.

Baker’s appointment marks the latest twist in the NCAA’s evolution

The NCAA’s first executive director, Walter Byers, led the organization for 38 years. He came to the job from a meager position: an assistant sports information director for the Big Ten.

He was succeeded until 2002 by a series of sports executives, often athletic directors. a time of rising tensions between academics and the ever-expanding business of college sports.

The position under Brand morphed into the position that now functions more like a czar, directing policy decisions that are sometimes political — such as removing championship events from campuses whose mascots were considered offensive to Native Americans — and dealing with the aspirations of the great conferences, which have increasingly stripped the NCAA of power

After Brand died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, his replacement was another university president. But while Emmert had honed his political skills in the world of academia, he was also immersed in college sports, having served as chancellor of the state of Louisiana, where he met an up-and-coming football coach, Nick Saban, and the president of the University of Washington. .

An early attempt to consolidate power failed when the NCAA was forced to reverse tough penalties against Penn State, including a $60 million fine, in the wake of the sex abuse scandal involving former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

With Emmert leaving, forced to resign more than two years before his contract expires, the job of president is more like that of a well-paid politician: a figurehead turned public punching bag and increasingly called upon to eat up Congress aid and to defend the NCAA’s business model in court.

Emmert took a beating for everything from failing to create eligibility guidelines for college athletes to a unanimous Supreme Court opinion denouncing what it called an exploitative system to allowing gender disparity between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.

With the public attention and huge business challenges, being an NCAA president, albeit well paid, seems unattractive for someone like Baker, who has spent most of his professional life in government.

“I certainly think the challenges here are significant,” Baker said, adding, “I think it’s important from my point of view that a lot of these issues are addressed and addressed in a way that works.”

And those challenges abound, from the NCAA’s transfer portal to players cashing in on their fame. A day before Baker’s appointment, the University of California Board of Regents approved a move by UCLA to the Pac-12’s Big Ten, doubling UCLA’s television contract to $60 million to $70 million per year. (The move was highly controversial within the UCLA community, but clearly motivated by financial considerations for the struggling athletic department.)

Baker chose not to comment Thursday on the list of challenges he will face, saying he still needs to focus on his job as governor for now.

“The big concern I have, and I’m sure it is the concern many people have when it comes to college sports, is that if we can’t find a way to organize and shape the future of college sports, we’re going to missing a great opportunity to provide a real opportunity to literally hundreds of thousands of children in the future,” he said.

He added: “It’s big and complicated. So there are a lot of things I’ve done in my life, but most of the time they were totally worth doing.

Billy Witz reporting contributed.