With the turn of the calendar from February to March, the NCAA officially entered a new era on Wednesday. Charlie Baker took over as the NCAA Commissioner, replacing Mark Emmert whose final day was on Tuesday.
The former Governor of Massachusetts was named as Emmert’s successor back on December 15. He also finished his second term as Massachusetts governor in January.
Now as commissioner, Baker steps into an age of college athletics that has seen an ever-evolving landscape over the last decade but especially over the last five years with the introduction of NIL. The 66-year-old Baker also knows that more major changes are likely to come as well as he discussed in an interview with USA TODAY Sports, sports project reporter Steve Berkowitz earlier this week.
“There’s a lot going on in the world of college sports,” Baker told Berkowitz in their interview. “There’s a ton of change. I certainly believe that change is necessary and required going forward.”
Some of those changes could include student-athletes being viewed more as employees of their universities than student-athletes. While Baker in the interview didn’t give a vote of approval of the idea, he did mention that issues such as additional benefits and compensation for student-athletes as an issue that could be looked at, “I think the question about additional benefits is certainly one of the conversations,” he told Berkowitz.
Baker and Berkowitz also discussed various other issues that will certainly be mainstay discussions during the beginning of his tenure as the NCAA president. Those issues included NIL, managing conference relationships, and the potential expansion of the NCAA basketball tournaments.
On top of those issues above, Baker will also have to navigate the challenges of being the president of the NCAA and fixing the reputation of the association. Whether fair or not, college athletic fans across the country lost confidence in the NCAA over the course of Mark Emmert’s nearly 12.5-year tenure as president, and its reputation because of that lost confidence also suffered.
While the NCAA’s control over college football at the FBS level continues to diminish more and more each year, it still has powerful control over almost every other sport in college athletics. With that, the strengthening of its reputation and regaining the public’s confidence in the association will be another crucial issue for Baker to tackle as his tenure gets underway.
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