Just over a month ago, when the National Collegiate Athletic
Association (
NCAA) was embroiled in another crisis of its own making, 21 board
members joined a hastily called videoconference with
Mark Emmert, the
persistently embattled president of the governing body of college sports.
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During the 69-minute session, they heard about disparities
between their men’s and women’s basketball tournaments and had, meeting minutes
show, “a discussion regarding the timeliness and substance of the response of
President Emmert and his staff” to a debacle that had embarrassed the NCAA amid
its signature yearly showcase.
Then, on Tuesday night and with a review into deep-rooted gender
equity issues still in its opening weeks, the association’s Board of Governors
stunned the rest of the college sports world with the announcement that it had
extended Emmert’s contract to the end of 2025. It was a multimillion-dollar
commitment, if Emmert’s past compensation remains a guide, to the man who is
among the greatest symbols of the gap between the day-to-day reality of college
athletics and the management of them.
The choice was instructive, suggesting that for all of the
turmoil that has enveloped the NCAA on Emmert’s watch, which began in 2010, the
board has little or no interest in policy or personnel exit ramps, or a sense
that it might soon need them. It was also an assertion of power: a reminder
that, despite the influence of the conference commissioners, coaches and
athletic directors who have growled and griped about Emmert for years, the most
substantive authority in the NCAA rests with part-time board members largely
drawn from the ranks of university presidents.
In a summary of Tuesday’s board meeting, the NCAA, which
declined to make a board member available for an interview, disclosed Emmert’s
extension with just 16 words beneath the heading “other business.” The
association took more than double the space to talk about a plan for fewer
in-person board meetings — sessions where, presumably, members will maintain
the plodding pace that the NCAA defends as a defining and necessary feature of
a group with about 1,100 member schools.
Tuesday’s unanimous vote lengthened Emmert’s deal by two years.
It also deepened the board’s embrace of a president whose era has included a
blizzard of controversies, not all of them self-inflicted, that range from the
NCAA’s handling of the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State to a splashy
television rights deal that still might have undervalued the tournaments that
draw millions of viewers.
“I don’t hire myself,” Emmert, whose last publicly disclosed pay
package was worth about $2.7 million a year, said this month. “The board does
that. I know there’s been plenty of things that have been done poorly or misses
that we’ve had over the years. I’m certainly happy to take my share of responsibility
for that. I don’t pretend like I’m infallible, that we’ve done everything
perfectly, or that I’ve done everything perfectly. I’ve made plenty of mistakes
and have learned from them.”
No NCAA leader will ever be fully immune from criticism; being a
target of complaints, warranted or not, is essentially a birthright of the gig.
But the board’s surprise move — executives at conferences and schools said that
they had no idea that an extension was even being considered, much less made
final — reflects a particular brand of stubbornness as the NCAA faces
legacy-shaping, industry-defining reckonings on everything from the financial
havoc of the coronavirus pandemic to the scope of the association’s power.
Emmert now figures to see the NCAA through much of it — and
maybe all of it. He has a supportive board that has been publicly unbothered by
his performance, even if he must contend with a disgruntled cadre of athletics
administrators on campuses and in conference offices.
“Mind-boggling,” said a commissioner of a Division I conference
who said “presidents seem hopelessly out of touch” and spoke on the condition
of anonymity to avoid rupturing the conference’s relationship with the NCAA.
The board, which includes eminences of American politics, sports
and business in addition to the university leaders, probably has plenty of
explanations for striking a new deal with Emmert.
Members may have been looking to give a dose of stability to the
NCAA, which has seen an array of senior officials plan their departures for one
reason or another. (Just last week, the White House announced that President
Joe Biden had chosen Donald Remy, the NCAA’s chief operating officer, as his
nominee for deputy secretary of veterans affairs. The secretary of veterans
affairs,
Denis McDonough, was a member of the NCAA’s board until last year.)
They may believe that a presidential shake-up would signal a
surrender on the industry’s myriad fights. Maybe they figure Emmert deserves to
be rewarded for keeping the NCAA afloat during the pandemic, even though it
lost nearly $56 million in the fiscal year that ended in August 2020.
It could be as simple as the board being chummy with Emmert, who
previously led Louisiana State and the University of Washington and said in an
interview in January that he had “no interest in moving away from this anytime
soon.”
A board, of course, is expected to offer a measure of
independent oversight and to try to remain above the daily turmoil and tensions
of a sprawling industry. There is danger, though, in a board or its chosen
executive being too distant, or even appearing so.
Yet that is what the NCAA walked into this week, sparking a
round of shock and fury and once again offering evidence of a disconnect that
has long left college sports prone to surprise and infighting.
The outrage was predictable, quite possibly even somewhat
preventable. But with the NCAA, it almost always is.
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