Mark Emmert is stepping down as NCAA president in June of 2023, and the only people who seem disappointed are those greedy-but-justified few who wish it was sooner.
Emmert was, with little dispute, bad at his job. He was paid millions of dollars a year to oversee a body governing “amateur” athletics, an admittedly difficult position to do well (given its natural absurdity), and he was still worse at it than the assumed median. He was either cartoonish in his dishonesty or the victim of a worldview seen through funhouse mirror after funhouse mirror, a guaranteed head-slammer of a quote machine every time anyone asked him a question. Remember a few months ago, when he called the position of university president the hardest job in America?
Still, one could argue that Emmert’s tenure was a good thing for collegiate athletics. In fact, we’re going to argue that right now.
College athletics are a messy thing. At some levels and in some sports and at some schools, they’re exactly what they’ve long been made out to be: Amateur competition between adolescents who love to compete, adolescents who are simultaneously gaining an education which would be, for many, difficult to obtain without the game they play. At other levels and in other sports and at other schools, they’re a façade-obscured semi-professional league of massive cultural significance in which athletes are often unpaid labor. It’s not just SEC football, either. This winter, I had lunch with a former Division III assistant men’s basketball coach who lamented how certain small-school programs would recruit players they knew would be unable to succeed academically, win for a year with them, then let them flunk out and move on to other bodies, to repeat the process again. College athletics, in situations beyond the “money-making” sports, are—like most things—an exercise in making money, and even when the school isn’t the entity making money, there are coaches profiting and sponsors profiting and bus companies profiting as they haul young men and women around the country to play softball and run track and swim and dive. Emmert’s tenure was the rare feat of incompetence capable of ripping the façade off of the semi-pro leagues while facilitating equal and ethical competition so poorly across the board that no reasonable case can now be made that the NCAA, in its current form, is good for the college athletes themselves.
It’s important that we specify here that we’re talking about Emmert’s tenure, and not about Emmert himself. It may be his fault. It may be a natural chain of events. It may be deeper flaws within those within the NCAA and those around it who shape it. Emmert didn’t hire himself, after all. It’s likely a mix of many things, but there’s a natural trap here into which many are falling that assigns more agency to Emmert than we know he had. Was Emmert really the problem? Or was he merely the figurehead, the ballooned-pocketed dunce getting a public, national lashing by Brett Kavanaugh, et al.? An absurdity exists within a dichotomy that pans Mark Emmert for bankruptcy in morality and competence but simultaneously assigns him credit for the downfall of an organization built upon an increasingly flawed premise.
The challenge now is not to find a good successor to Emmert. Yes, finding a good successor is good. Competence is, most of the time, a good thing, and a combination of morality and competence would be welcomed with open arms here and most anywhere. But the real challenge is defining that successor’s job. Because by nature, the person hired to lead the NCAA is going to be tasked with leading the NCAA, and what’s best for the NCAA is not at all what’s best for college sports. Putting the lid back on the bottle is not going to help. “Reshaping” the approach is not going to help. What college sports need most is an NCAA with a much smaller scope, one that simply facilitates national competition, organizing postseason tournaments across all three of its levels in dozens of sports, something it does excellently already. We see this, messily but clearly, right now in men’s basketball. Basketball is reportedly the only sport that makes the NCAA money (hilariously and tellingly, the Power Five conferences made the decision decades ago to kick the NCAA out of the room when it came to football), with the NCAA Tournament iconic and NCAA enforcement of sanctions so delayed and inconsistent that it’s but a vague threat, libertarian not in word but in deed, with no real deterrent for rule-breaking. The NCAA should not be enforcing rules about pay-to-play, and it’s already not enforcing rules about academics (see: North Carolina, University of). The NCAA doesn’t care about academics except insofar as they can add that “student” word to the front end of “student-athlete.” The NCAA is not stopping Division III basketball coaches from setting vulnerable high school kids up for failure. The NCAA can only do one thing well, and it’s the only thing it should do: Run fun postseason tournaments for college kids from Division I to Division III, from men’s basketball to beach volleyball.
Who should enforce these rules, then? Who should make these rules? Conferences. Conferences need to decide what they, as entities, are going to be, which is exactly what the two most powerful conferences in America—the SEC and the Ivy League, and I’m talking America not American sports—do very well already. The SEC is a semi-professional league in most if not all of its sports (more and more by the year, as ESPN grows more audacious in its coverage of lesser-covered competition). The Ivy League is a mostly amateur organization with strict rules designed to promote true student-athletics. Is either perfect? Far from it. But as it’s been designed to work in our sort of society for over two hundred years, the enforcement mechanism for that is not the institution of a single, incapable governing body, but simple shaming by a free press. The NCAA is shameless. Individual schools, beholden to alumni and students, are not. Is this idealistic? Probably, but when you’re designing an ideal situation you have to be idealistic, and the choices laid out before us are either to 1) allow the NCAA to pretend it’s doing something, preventing anyone else from even trying and 2) tear the NCAA down to what it does well, leaving the rest up to schools, schools which organically organize into conferences.
The end result scares many, because it looks a little different from how it looks now. The thing is: It’s not all that different. And the other thing is: It’s not actually worse. The end result is, yes, a collection of semi-professional leagues with varying degrees of “semi” and varying attachments to academics. The teams will be organized by universities and colleges, our current society’s biggest individual cultural rallying points, in which membership is self-selected by geography and ideology and religion and socioeconomics and (yeah, we’re not going to ignore HBCU’s) race. It will be the same as it currently is, but without the façades. Much like the industrial leagues of the early days of professional sports, athletes will be brought to these “company towns” (an alternative, comparably accurate word for the term, “campus”) based on what they can do on the field. They’ll be brought with money and the allure of glory, they’ll bring money and glory to the institution, it will all be as it currently is, but without all the pretending. If a collection of schools plays by such different rules that other schools don’t want to play with them, they won’t have to. If the SEC wants to exist independently from the other leagues, it can. National championships will still make money, and things like the NCAA Tournament will still draw eyeballs, and colleges will find a way to answer the financial call, with the NCAA there to facilitate postseason competition when it’s best for all parties that they do so.
Again, yes, we recognize the idealism here. It will likely not be smooth, and it will likely not reach any stable state, let alone a perfect one. It isn’t stable now. But it will be better than it has been. If instead of focusing on a successor who can rebuild the NCAA, we look to do what has become clearly necessary: Tear the NCAA down.
Portal Updates
In the men’s basketball transfer portal, of national note:
- Malachi Smith, the best player on a Chattanooga team with plenty of good players (and now EvanMiya’s 12th-ranked transferring player), is in the portal.
- De’Vion Harmon, a starting guard at Oregon this past year and one of the Pac-12’s best offensive players, is in the portal.
- KC Ndefo, not an EvanMiya five-star but arguably Saint Peter’s best player, is in the portal.
And for Iowa State fans in the room:
- Jaren Holmes, a four-star EvanMiya shooting guard out of St. Bonaventure who played the fourth-most minutes per game in the country last year, visited Ames. He’d be a big pickup for the Cyclones, providing some veteran experience and helping with ball-handling duties from a team still trying to fill a Tyrese Hunter-sized hole at the point. Fingers crossed.
The Cubs
Marcus Stroman looked better (not great, but better) last night, which is huge. He got hit around a bit, but he didn’t walk a single batter, and there’s little to complain about with getting hit around by the Atlanta lineup, which continues to massacre the ball despite middling 2022 results. The Cubs lost, only managing one run against Max Fried, but it’s the kind of game you don’t usually ask a rebuilding team to win. You’d be thrilled if they won it, and hopefully by next year the Cubs are in a position to win these sorts of games, but they’re not there yet. They’re not yet good enough to beat Max Fried on the road.
Tonight, it’s Mark Leiter Jr. against Charlie Morton in another that, frankly, the Cubs shouldn’t win. It’s fair to ask them to not get swept, and tomorrow—Drew Smyly vs. Kyle Wright—looks kind of rough, too, so it would be good if the Cubs could at least win one of these two, but if the Cubs can at least be competitive tonight, it’s hard to be very upset. It’s possible for this Cubs team to make a surge, but even that’s probably more reliant on cleaning up against the woeful NL Central than beating one of the two or three best teams in baseball (on paper) in their own ballpark.
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Viewing schedule today, second screen in italics (and some overlap, but I trust we can all manage that, this is a weird hypothetical that serves little purpose but to help me remember what’s happening across sports, after all—just turn off the Mariners and flip back if Bulls/Bucks is making you sad):
- 1:15 PM EDT: Mets @ Cardinals (Regional TV) – Carrasco vs. Matz
- 3:40 PM EDT: Dodgers @ Diamondbacks (Regional TV) – Urías vs. Gallen
- 6:40 PM EDT: Mariners @ Rays (Regional TV) – Gonzales vs. Rasmussen
- 7:20 PM EDT: Cubs @ Atlanta (Regional TV) – Leiter vs. Morton
- 7:30 PM EDT: Bulls @ Bucks (TNT)
- 9:45 PM EDT: A’s @ Giants (Regional TV) – Blackburn vs. Long
- 10:00 PM EDT: Nuggets @ Warriors (TNT)
