Michigan State football adding 2024 tight end Charlie Baker as PWO commit
Michigan State football continues to add to their 2024 recruiting class through the preferred walk-on method. Another PWO commitment came in this week from 2024 tight end Charlie Baker.
At 6-foot-5, Baker certainly has Big Ten size and should be a nice addition to that position group for the Spartans. He currently plays for East Lansing High School.
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For the first time in 26 years, Michigan football is the national champion and for the first time ever, it is undisputed through winning the national championship game.
While the maize and blue faithful have been elated since Monday evening, oddly, so have some rival fans of the Wolverines.
Why would they be? Because theyâve held out hope that the NCAA would swoop in after the fact, as a result of the investigation into Connor Stalions and his sign-stealing scheme, and force Michigan to vacate wins and also the national championship.
It was wishcasting in its finest, and now, though the NCAA has yet to offer a notice of allegations at this juncture, given the comments by president Charlie Baker on Wednesday, the Wolverines won the national championship âfair and square.â
âI donât regret doing it because sitting on that information, given the comprehensiveness of it â I think we would have put everyone, including Michigan, in an awful place,â Baker said. âAs it was, it was out in the public domain and people either made adjustments or didnât.
âAt the end of the day, no one believes at this point that Michigan didnât win the national title fair and square. So, I think we did the right thing.â
Baker said he wasnât conflicted about the outcome of the championship game, either, since he believes he took the right action in a complicated situation. Because the NCAA investigation centered on an illegal on-campus scouting and sign-stealing operation, the rules being violated could have impacted games still to be played in the 2023 season. Baker believed that Michigan and its conference deserved the right to act in the moment to preserve the fairness of the competition, rather than wait until the end of a drawn-out investigation process.
âIt might affect the outcome of games, and I donât believe, at the end of the season, that it did,â Baker said. âAnd I think thatâs important.â
Obvious things are obvious.
Itâs much like Fox Sportsâ premier analyst Joel Klatt has said multiple times now, those who know little about actual football think this is a bigger deal than it actually is. Did what happened warrant an investigation? Thatâs up for debate, but Michigan football fans can rest easy knowing that the championship just won will remain on the books.
While rival fans can come up with other fantastical, imaginary scenarios that blot what happened in front of their eyes from their own memory.
Charlie Baker, who took over from Mark Emmert, is clearly excited about the idea of maximizing the TV value of women’s basketball.
You might have noticed that Iowa’s win over South Carolina in the Women’s Final Four on ESPN set numerous television ratings records and represented a milestone moment in the growth of women’s hoops as a commercial product.
Before Iowa played LSU on Sunday afternoon in the women’s national championship game, the new president of the NCAA spoke about the big opportunity which sits in front of the organization as it tries to make more money for its member schools.
Charlie Baker, who recently replaced Mark Emmert as the president of the NCAA, addressed the idea of separating the Women’s NCAA Tournament from other NCAA sports championships as a media property. This move, if executed, could establish a high market value for the event and untether it from other sports.
Creating a standalone Women’s NCAA Tournament would presumably enable the NCAA to establish the win-unit structure the men’s tournament currently uses. This would provide a vehicle for pumping millions of dollars in new revenue into conferences and their schools.
“I think the biggest opportunity there — and I would argue that the investments that have been made in the women’s game have had a tremendous return to the women’s game and to the players and the coaches and everybody else — is the fact that the timing on the bid associated with this is perfect,” Baker told reporters at the men’s Final Four in Houston on Saturday. “Basically, this thing is going out this year and it’s going out on the heels of what will have been the most successful tournament. … Let’s see what the market thinks it’s worth. I think the market is going to think it’s worth a lot.”
Pac-12 schools and athletic departments can’t wait to get their hands on a piece of this revenue pie.
The thing is only one of them is being willfully obtuse
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The name, image and likeness space in the NCAA is absolutely the wild, wild west.
Sure, it’s been fun. And some of the deals we’ve seen have been cool. But there’s lots of money being thrown around with no parameters behind it.
That’s why it’s hard to say that NCAA President Charlie Baker is off with this call for regulation in the NIL marketplace.
He joined Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellog during the NCAA Tournament’s in-studio pregame show to talk about these issues and he called on “the folks in Washington” to help with developing “consumer protections” for the NIL landscape.
New NCAA President (and former Governor of Massachusetts) Charlie Baker says he wants "consumer protections" around NIL, saying he's "gonna talk some with the folks in Washington."
“I would love to create some accountability and trasnparency around that so the families know what they’re getting into. And I would really like to see some sort of uniform standard contract, so that when somebody signs it they know they’re signing the same kind of agreement everybody else is signing.”
These are some good, positive ideas. But if the NCAA is calling on the federal government to help with it, something like this could take a while.
That’s why Charles Barkley called him out for it. He doesn’t want politicians to help â he wants the NCAA to create its own committee for this stuff and solve its own problems. And that’s a good idea, too.
But, uh, aren’t we galaxy-braining this entire thing?
It’s great that players are finally able to profit off of their own names as the NCAA has been doing for decades with student-athletes at this point. But this still does not solve the core problem here, which is that players are still not being compensated at all for their labor.
Charlie Baker, I know you’re new around here. But do you want to know the real way to solve these issues? Pay the players.
The NCAA is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. All this NIL business is is the NCAA allowing others to do the work that it should be doing in paying its workforce. OK, fine. But now you want to regulate it, too? How does that work? You can’t do both without any pushback. This is the NCAA telling others how to do the job that it should be doing.
Washington regulators can get involved as much as they want. But thinking that more regulation will ultimately solve what was already an imbalanced marketplace is a fool’s errand.
Whatever they manage to come up with will likely only be a stopgap measure before some booster-based organization finds another way to curtail the new rules, just as they’ve always done. The game is the game, man. It’s been this way for years â even before NIL deals were ever a thing.
The way to solve this problem is ultimately the same as its always ever been. Paying the players what they are owed. Until the NCAA chooses to do that, its problems won’t go away.
Quick Hits: Mick Cronin’s hilarious impatience…The coolest alley-oop ever…and more
(AP Photo/John Locher)
â Mick Cronin has to be the most unintentionally funny coach in the world. The guy was so mad he had to wait 33 minutes for his postgame press conference after UCLA’s loss to Gonzaga.
A new era is set to begin and the NCAA prez has a lot to do.
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.
“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.â
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.
The Boston Celtics and other area sports teams will be allowed to use practice facilities again soon, according MA Governor Charlie Baker.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has officially announced he will give an executive order allowing professional sports teams to begin practicing again in the state, reports Boston.com’s Katie McInerney.
Teams such as the Boston Celtics, Red Sox and Bruins will be able to resume practicing in their own facilities as of June 6 even as Boston Mayor Marty Walsh continues to hold off on allowing local games in arenas.
The latter matters little to the Celtics, as the NBA plans to host a single-site resumption of the 2019-20 in Orlando Florida later in the summer at Walt Disney World’s Wide World of Sports complex.
Still, having access to the Waltham practice facility should help ease some of the competitive disadvantage teams in markets with less restrictive locations have had over Boston in recent weeks.
“I know we still arenât to the point where weâll have our pro sports teams back playing anything yet,” Governor Baker said. “The leagues are obviously working hard to host games again. And I think we all hope that at some point, opening practice facilities will help make that happen a little sooner.”
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker was the man behind the mission in attaining the N95 masks.
The New England Patriots came through for the state of Massachusetts in a big way last week by using their plane to retrieve 1.2 million N95 masks from China.
The masks were a dire need to help keep frontline workers protected while trying to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The Patriots also made the effort to ship 300,000 of those masks to New York. Patriots owner Robert Kraft and  president Jonathan Kraft played a big role in the effort, but Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker was behind it all.
“After we had the incident at the Port of New York I started calling people I knew in Massachusetts who had global relationships,” Baker said. “And one of the great things about Massachusetts, we have a lot of global citizens. ⌠What I was looking for is somebody who could actually help me purchase N95 masks somewhere else. And eventually, I came across some folks who could help me purchase a significant amount of N95 masks in China. Then the question became how do we get them back to the U.S.? We basically concluded that doing something with traditional commercial transport either by boat or by plane would be risky and we needed to come up with a big private plane.”
“Now, there are lots of small private planes but if you want to get a big cargo you need a big private plane,” Baker said. “As I thought about that I remembered that the Patriots have a big private plane. So I called Jonathan Kraft and said, âI think I have a path to purchase a significant number of N95 masks which we really need.â I asked the Krafts if they would be willing to spearhead the process of working with us to get the plane out of the U.S. into China and back. Eventually, it became like a humanitarian mission.
“The flight path was basically Boston to Alaska where people sort of slept and refreshed themselves and then Alaska to the airport in China. Then three hours on the ground, nobody got off the plane, nobody came into the plane. The only part of the plane that was open was the cargo hold and the gear was put by a China company into the cargo hold. We had a three-hour window they permitted the plane to be on the ground. They were on the ground for 2 hours and 57 minutes. Then they flew back to Alaska and flew from Alaska the next day back to Boston.”
The crew completed the mission in the nick of time and helped a ton of people in the process.
“It was a lot of moving parts to that thing and a lot of people both in the U.S. and in China were very helpful in making it happen. And we really needed it,” Baker said.”
