Mark Emmert’s Radical Change Of Philosophy On What The NCAA Should Be

This is a time of sweeping change in college athletics as the NCAA, which has set the table for over 100 years, is being gradually pushed to the side.

Or not so gradually.

NIL rights started in July, supposedly on an interim basis until the association could figure out a way to manage it or get Congress to pass a law to regulate it, something that Congress, in its current state of polarization, would probably find next to impossible even if it was interested, and pretty clearly, it’s not.

After completely surrendering on the NIL issue, NCAA President Mark Emmert seems to be giving up completely and taking a hands off approach to the entire enterprise.

A few weeks ago he was calling for help. Not too long before that, he was threatening to boycott California over its NIL law.

Now? Speaking to some reporters, Emmert said this: “When you have an environment like [now with NIL rights] it just forces us to think more about what constraints should be put in place ever on college athletes. And it should be the bare minimum...I think this is a really, really propitious moment to sit back and look at a lot of the core assumptions and say, ‘You know, if we were going to build college sports again, and in 2020 instead of 1920, what would that look like? What would we change? What would we expect or want to be different in the way we manage it. And this is good. This is the right time.”

Well it is now - because states and the Supreme Court forced the NCAA to accept things it was never willing to accept.

So now the real question: if that’s where things are going, what exactly is he getting paid for?