On a college athletics ship floundering in turbulent seas, NCAA president Mark Emmert has been a calamitous captain.
The only impressive hallmark of the latter half of his 12-year tenure is an ability to avoid an outright mutiny (although this abrupt departure announcement might have been the sign of one coming). The only thing worse than his presidential performance has been the utterly tone-deaf decision by the NCAA Board of Governors to extend his contract last year, when the rank and file held him in complete disdain.
If there is a less respected current CEO of any organization, I don’t know who it is. The NCAA’s outdated policies led to a public tipping point that was inevitable no matter who was president, but boy howdy did Emmert play the role of inept figurehead like it was a Hollywood script.
Per the NCAA release Tuesday night, Emmert will remain in his position until June 2023, unless a replacement is named sooner than that. Regardless, he’s all but finished as the public face of the NCAA and will likely go back to doing what he has done for most of his NCAA tenure—keeping a low profile, because he performed so poorly in the spotlight. It would be fitting if his last appearance in an official capacity was at the Final Four in New Orleans on April 6, when circumstances collided to make him look more inept than ever.
This was Emmert’s Final Folly, announcing the men’s basketball national championship trophy would be presented to “the Kansas City Jayhawks.” That was an embarrassing flub, but the University of Kansas Jayhawks’s presence in the NCAA tournament alone provided the larger contextual humiliation. This Kansas title was the symbol of the NCAA’s futility in enforcing its own rules. The Jayhawks won it all while facing allegations of major violations that date back to a 2017 federal investigation of corruption in college basketball—allegations that seem likely to result in a postseason ban of one or more years, whenever the NCAA gets around to completing the case.
Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
That infractions case owed its existence not to detective work by NCAA Enforcement, but to the FBI. It had been meandering through an irredeemably slow process ever since, delayed by federal trials and the COVID-19 pandemic, but compounded by the NCAA’s own decision to outsource complex cases to a new hearing panel and investigators. That outsourcing, in turn, came at the recommendation of an Emmert-appointed panel tasked with addressing the vast array of problems in college basketball.
The panel was well-intentioned but fatally flawed in a classic NCAA way—full of establishment types and policy wonks who had little idea how the sausage gets made in youth basketball. As a result, they devised an “off-ramp” that became the Independent Accountability Review Process, which earned a mindless rubber stamp from NCAA membership, then went on to become the single worst aspect of Emmert’s spectacularly bad tenure. The IARP has wasted money and time, and, as of this writing, accomplished almost nothing while tasked with adjudicating the biggest influx of major cases in NCAA history. It was an outside-the-box experiment when, as one longtime college administrator put it, “this was no time for experimentation.”
So, Kansas wins it all and laughs all the way back to Lawrence after basically giving the NCAA the middle finger for the past 4 1/2 years. (Up to and including a lifetime contract for coach Bill Self, who is named in the major violations.) While this is certainly a reflection of Kansas’s institutional choice to be utterly disdainful of its own culpability, it also is a glaring reflection of the disrespect so many schools have for the NCAA as a whole.
Emmert’s early tenure as NCAA president was marked by his disastrous attempt at cowboy justice in the wake of the Penn State Jerry Sandusky abuse scandal. With the imprimatur from the NCAA Board of Governors, Emmert attempted to skirt the established bylaws and apply an extra helping of sanctions to the Nittany Lions football program. While that satisfied some moral outrage, it didn’t fit within the NCAA penalty structure and had to be walked back dramatically.
That, combined with some really poor off-the-cuff comments in public settings, led to Emmert retreating into a shell he never really left. His media appearances increasingly came with multiple sidekicks from within the governance structure, an attempt to get him to speak less and others who might be more thoughtful or diplomatic to speak more. A person making a base salary of $2.7 million a year couldn’t be trusted not to put his foot in his mouth.
Other self-inflicted wounds followed. Emmert’s response to concerns about gender inequity in the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments got him rightly roasted. His appearances in front of Congress, groveling for intervention as NCAA policies became obsolete in real time, were target practice for politicians. Capable and caring NCAA staffers kept leaving the association.
Increasingly, the power in college sports relocated from the NCAA office in Indianapolis to the offices of conference commissioners. The more football skyrocketed in revenue (and expense), the less involved the NCAA was, having long ago lost control of how that sport is run. Football continues to drive everything, including the wedge between those who play it at the high end and those who don’t.
In the end, Emmert’s responsibilities were reduced to being a high-priced meat shield for the NCAA’s army of critics. He was paid a lot to take a lot of reproval, including from the likes of Mike Krzyzewski at the Final Four. He had to make a few speeches and hold a couple of press conferences, at the NCAA Convention and the Final Four, otherwise got out of the way and kept quiet.
Thus the heavy lifting of an attempted makeover of college athletics fell to a Transformation Committee led by a conference commissioner (Greg Sankey of the Southeastern Conference) and athletic director (Julie Cromer of Ohio). They have been tasked with a radical remake and by all accounts have taken that directive seriously. Sankey and Cromer spoke at the Final Four about the likelihood of recommending major substantive changes by Aug. 1 and, in recent days, have been meeting with groups of the membership to provide updates.
It calls into question the timing of Emmert’s “mutual agreement” with the NCAA Board of Governors to step down. It could well be the Transformation Committee has signaled that it believes a change in leadership is necessary (Sankey, for one, is no fan of Emmert). It’s clearly overdue, but a push from powerful forces on the inside might be what it took to finally end this dismal period in NCAA leadership.
Of course, the next question is a terrifying one: who the hell would want this job? Who wants to try to ride the college athletics tiger at a time like this? Emmert wasn’t good at his job, but is anyone capable of wrapping his or her arms around this untamed period of player compensation, player movement, conference realignment and even more unchecked spending that could massively threaten Olympic sports? All that is at stake is the potential fracturing of NCAA Division I, as Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick surmised to Sports Illustrated last week.
This is a borderline impossible job and it might require a radically different approach from whomever fills it. You’ll see plenty of candidates who are already embedded within the machinery of college athletics, but that machinery is breaking down all over the place. It could be time for a dramatic change from the Usual Suspects.
At the very least, the most suspect of the Usual Suspects is on the way out. Goodbye to Mark Emmert. Good riddance to a feckless leader. And good luck to the next person to take on the brutally difficult job.
