Inside the Future of College Sports: NCAA Pres. Breaks Down Major Reforms

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, there’s big money in U.S. college sports, as everyone knows. And in the era of name, image, and likeness, some of the top athletes can earn millions of dollars every year. For the first time ever though, a new agreement called the House Settlement will allow for schools to pay players directly. Charlie Baker, the former Massachusetts governor, now president of the NCAA, says it’s a win for student athletes, and he’s joining Michel Martin to explain why and what this means for their future.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Charlie Baker, thank you so much for joining us.

CHARLIE BAKER, PRESIDENT, NCAA: It’s nice to be with you.

MARTIN: So, of course everybody’s heard of the NCAA, but just to kind of set the table for us, I don’t think everybody knows what the NCAA is. So, just briefly as you can, it was an organization that was founded, gosh, over a century ago. What’s the purpose of it?

BAKER: The point and purpose of it is to provide as positive a student athlete experience as it possibly can on behalf of about 1,100 schools and about 510,000 student athletes across three divisions. And the way to think about the divisions are Division 1 typically are the bigger schools. Division 2 are schools that are a little smaller than Division 1. And Division 3 tend to be schools that we think of as sort of smaller schools, don’t typically do athletic scholarships, mostly do their scholarships based on financial or academic eligibility. And honestly, you know, as the father of two D3 athletes and as a D1 athlete myself and somebody who knows a lot of people who played in D2, they all have a role to play and they all make a difference for young people and they’re spread across all 50 states.

MARTIN: You’re a former governor of Massachusetts, two-term governor. You ran a healthcare company. You know, the typical trajectory for governor would be like, you go to the Senate, maybe you run for president. So what, why did you wanna do this job?

BAKER: I wasn’t planning on doing it. I got a call from a friend of mine in late October of the last year of my term, which would basically be 60 days before it was over, who said that he’d been asked about candidates for the president of the NCAA and he’d thought of me. And I sort of laughed. I couldn’t understand why. But he said, look, they’re looking for somebody who’s got firsthand experience in college sports, which I have. And they wanted somebody who could work in a really complicated decision making model. And the NCAA is 180 committees. It’s it’s, they, they cover every topic you can think of. And there are literally thousands of me – representatives from the membership who serve on these committees to make decisions. And also in sort of a turbulent time, as I’m sure you and I will talk about. And look, I really benefited from my experience playing basketball at Harvard. In fact, I tell people all the time, it was a place where I really felt like I belonged. Finding your community really matters. That was mine. And I really do believe that college sports is about a lot more than just playing a game. You learn a lot about how to be a teammate, how to do the grind, how to get back up when you get knocked down. And the organization was clearly facing some significant challenges. And I’m not afraid of decision making models that are messy and complicated ’cause I’ve been living ’em for most of my career.

MARTIN: So, you know, one of the things that you did when you first became president was go on a listening tour, you know, of all of the conferences.

BAKER: Yes.

MARTIN: Is there something you heard at these listening tours that really informs your thinking about the job now and is it different from what you expected?

BAKER: So, I talked to all 97 conferences in my first six months or so. I wanted to do it in my first a hundred days. That was ridiculous. I think the biggest thing I would say that came out of that was, believe it or not, the impact of social media on student athletes, just an incredible — kids would show me a lot of this stuff that was being directed at them. And we actually have on many of our national championships a monitoring service to track traffic that’s being directed at student athletes, coaches, and umpires during those tournaments. And if we see people engaging in what I would describe as brutal activity, we notify the platforms, you can get those people shut off.

MARTIN: You mean like threats or you mean like harassing them if they don’t make a play that they want or like, give me an example?

BAKER: So, begin to believe. Threats — you know, literally people saying things like — and this is all tied up to some extent with sports betting, which is another thing I kept hearing about, which we can talk more about if you want. All this stuff about, I know where you live, I know what dorm you’re in, I’m going to kill you, stuff like that.

MARTIN: What? Are you kidding me? You’re threatening —

BAKER: Yes.

MARTIN: So, if a kid — so sports betting, I guess it’s a specific way you can bet — where you can bet on a specific outcome, not the whole game itself, not the score, which is what people might think, but like a specific — what number of —

BAKER: You can bet on a student athlete. You can bet on whether they take the first shot, you can bet on whether they score more points than they’re supposed to, or they score less points. It’s a significant issue. And you know, thankfully, about half the states in the country don’t permit crop betting at all, which is what that betting on an individual is called. About half of the states don’t permit those bets on college sports and on college student athletes, the other half do. And we’ve been pursuing a variety of strategies to try to get them out of the business of prop bets. I mean, you can’t really solve the issue about somebody betting on whether a team wins or loses, but I would like to take as much of the individual attention being directed at young people and especially the challenges associated with, quote, “underperformance” off the table. I can tell you a lot of kids would come up to me and say but they are getting pressured by their classmates, their schoolmates, their friends, you know, to not do well in a game or to not take the first shot or miss their first free throw or don’t catch the first pass or whatever it might be.

MARTIN: Wow.

BAKER: Because that’s a way student athletes can help those — their friends, in many cases, make money.

MARTIN: Money make. So, money. So, we’re on the subject of money. That is one of the huge changes in college sports in a very recent period. So, what’s happened in recent years is that students can get paid for their name, image, and likeness. You support that. Say why?

BAKER: I do.

MARTIN: Yes. Say why.

BAKER: Because I think, look, if you’re a — there’s a lot of different things you can do as a young person where you can get paid for your name, image, and likeness, right? You can be a fashionista. You can be a musician. You can be a whole bunch of different things, and there will be people out there who will pay you for the fact that you have 3 million followers on TikTok, or you have 5 million followers on Instagram. I don’t see any reason why student athletes whose name, image, and likeness has a lot to do with the success of a lot of college sports programs. And this dates all the way back to the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit many, many years ago. They should be reimbursed for that. And I was the — you know, I was the first NCAA president to sort of put a proposal out there about how we might do that about six months after I got the job.

MARTIN: One of the points that the students made like at O’Bannon and other athletes made is the institutions make a lot of money off their name, image, and likeness, they sell their jerseys, sometimes they’ll have spirit days where they’ll sign the posters. They sell the posters, people sign them. Coaches certainly made a lot of money. So, why do you think there was so much resistance to that idea?

BAKER: To be honest with you, I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with it, and I think the settlement we’re trying to negotiate with a number of plaintiffs around these issues, which would basically make it possible for many Division 1 schools, which is really where the action is on this.

MARTIN: Yes.

BAKER: Most people know the D2 and D3 schools don’t make money on sports, and that sports is an investment that the schools make in the students. I think the — from my point of view, I do think it’s appropriate for the kids — the student athletes, the young people to benefit from their name, image, and likeness. And I’m hoping we can get this settlement approved so that we can actually put it into practice in a legal — under a legal format that would be associated with the injunction that we’re trying to seek.

MARTIN: So, it would allow them to pay — it would allow these schools to pay their athletes directly?

BAKER: They would be able to purchase their student athlete’s name, image, and likeness rights up to 22.5 percent of the athletic budgets of the top 60 schools, the power schools, so-called. And that’s about $20 million per school per year. So, if you add it all up, it’s probably about a billion dollars in potential name, image, and likeness revenues going to student athletes.

MARTIN: Look, I saw an analysis of this past year’s top NIL earners, right, of the top five. All but one are white, all but one are male, all but one football and basketball. Is there anything about that that worries you?

BAKER: Well, the biggest problem I have with everything that’s out there right now, Michel, is you can’t believe any of it. OK. I mean, literally, you can’t believe any of it. Because —

MARTIN: Because we don’t really know? We don’t really know how much they’re making?

BAKER: Oh, no one knows. I’m telling you — and by the way, I don’t believe anything anybody says about NIL, because everybody lies. OK? One of the great things about —

MARTIN: And then they lie in which direction, how much they’re getting or how well —

BAKER: — in the upward direction.

MARTIN: It’s always more? Really?

BAKER: So — yes.

MARTIN: See, my instinct would be to go the other way, but that’s just me. OK. I’d be like, no, I’m not only — but anyway. I’ll take your word for it.

BAKER: So, one of the things about the settlement that’s important here, for fans, I think, and for student athletes and families and schools and everybody else is, we’re actually going to have two reporting systems, right? There’s going to be one for the school-based NIL and one for third-party NIL. And every deal is going to have to get approved going through that system. And one of the things we’ll have for the first time is the ability to aggregate some of that data and say, this is what student athletes who play these positions were getting in school-based NIL and this is what athletes who were playing these positions on the on the third-party NIL were getting. And we’ll finally have real answers to questions like what are the positions where people seem to get the most amount of money, and what are the sports they’re playing, and you know, how much of this is men and how much of it is women? Because right now nobody really knows what’s actually going be on there. I mean, I think the current — I think that’s one of the great tragedies of the current system, the fact that there are no rules means student athletes literally don’t know who to believe about much of anything, which is a shame.

MARTIN: OK. So, I take your point on that. But another major shift here that we do know about is that the NCAA, it’s been announced, would not directly oversee these new payrolls. You know, the big D1 schools that are understood to be the — where the most revenue is, they tend to be the pipeline to the pros, they would take on enforcement through this new body called the College Sports Commission. Tell me about that. Like why do you support this change? It would seem to diminish the role of the NCAA in setting rules. So, could you say more about that?

BAKER: Yes, yes. The — keep in mind that this thing is part of a settlement, right? The NCAA, the power conferences, right, the five power conferences, SEC, Pac-12, because it was still part of the drill then, the Big 10, the Big 12, and the ACC, and that’s who the plaintiffs sued. OK? So, they sued the NCAA and those schools because that’s who they felt were responsible for what they considered to be this injustice that needed to be righted. In the end, what they wanted was the NCAA to be accountable for back damages, right, which — and our members, which we’re going to pay $2.86 billion to hundreds of thousands of former student athletes under this negotiation. $285 million a year for the next 10 years. And they wanted the power schools to own the obligation and responsibility for setting up and running the new system so that they could keep an eye on it. The plaintiffs could keep an eye on it and the special master from the court could keep an eye on it to make sure it was being implemented the way it was supposed to be. NCAA writes bylaws, OK, which the membership adopts. This is a law, law, a federal law, which if it gets approved is going to sit inside an injunction. And under those sets of rules, the plaintiffs wanted the power schools to be fundamentally and directly accountable for the issues associated with overseeing and managing and enforcing. But generally speaking, the thing I like about this is I do believe, at the end of the day, and the courts did as well, and so did the plaintiffs, that a lot of the activity associated with this NIL process is going to come from those schools. And therefore, those are the schools that the courts believed and the plaintiffs believed needed to be fundamentally held most accountable to the highest level with respect to compliance.

MARTIN: But they’ll be held accountable for money. So, what I’m asking you is, what about the other piece, their medical wellbeing, their emotional wellbeing? Do you still have a role —

BAKER: Yes, yes. That stuff still belongs to the NCAA.

MARTIN: Right.

BAKER: The only thing — the way I talk about this, the money piece, it’s going to belong inside this court framework, overseen by the courts, monitored by the plaintiffs, managed by the so-called power schools that we talked about. The other stuff, you know, sports betting, playing rules, health and wellbeing, all that stuff, that’s still going to belong to us, on the NCAA side, which I — look, I don’t have a problem with this distribution because mostly I want to create a system that has some degree of accountability and process transparency for young people. Because a lot of what’s going on right now is just misrepresentation, false promises, and a whole bunch of not good things. I mean, because there is no data, right, and because the schools really aren’t in this spot and don’t really have a role currently, about a third of the kids that go in the transfer portal every year, most of them go there because some third-party told them there was an opportunity we can’t find. You know, that’s a big number of kids.

MARTIN: Do you think it’s any worse now than it was when there was money under the table before? Not for every sport, certainly and not at every school, but there have been enough court cases that there’s been enough, there have been enough prosecutions to know.

BAKER: I would say I think there’s more money involved now. And there are a lot of people who are repping student athletes who are charging ridiculous fees for the honor of repping them. And I think, again, because these people really aren’t accountable to anybody and they’re very, there’s very little process transparency at all, I think you have an environment where it’s very hard for a mom and a dad or a young person to know quote unquote what’s true. And I do think the settlement, if we can get it approved, will create enough process transparency inside that injunction with a federal judge looking over it and the plaintiff’s paying a lot of plaintiff lawyers paying a lot of attention to it. I do think that will create a system that’s a lot less likely to take advantage of people.

MARTIN: And frenetic. And do you see the transfer this sort of, this frenetic transfer activity to be sort of part of that as well? I mean, just sort of one data point. I mean The Washington Post crunched the numbers during March Madness, that’s the NCAA sort of basketball tournament earlier this year that said, you know, 53 percent of the men in the conference, you know, the top sort of conference players and 40 percent of the women had all played for more than one school. And you know, people look at that in different ways, they say, hey, you know, coaches leave, you know, coaches quit jobs and go at other jobs. But for a student, I mean, any — if you’ve ever transferred schools, you know, it can be hard to kind of put it all together, to find your people, to actually have a quality college experience. What’s your opinion of it? Do you think that this — the level of sort of transfers that we’re seeing is healthy and productive or do you feel something needs to be different there?

BAKER: The number of college kids, according to federal data, who transfer at least once if they go to four-year institutions is like a third. So, there — I mean, when you and I were in school, no one transferred?

MARTIN: No.

BAKER: I think in part because we didn’t have access to the information that a lot of these kids have now. Because they can learn anything they want to know about any school in an hour just by getting on their phone. I think the — I mean your point about coaches, there were 50 men’s basketball coaches who transferred, who changed jobs between the start of March Madness and the end of March Madness last — this past spring. So, when that many coaches are moving around, there’s no question that’s going to have an impact on how many student athletes move around. I do think putting this more directly between schools and student athletes where schools can talk about academic plans, development plans and athletic plans probably means that kids will be a little stickier with respect to where they stay because they’ll see a path forward that makes sense for them. But I also think the — I do think the biggest challenge on this one is going to be some degree of transparency around what’s real and what’s not. Because as I said, a third of those kids that we’re talking about who ended up in the portal and that story in The Post we’re not going to be able to find them, having landed somewhere for next year. And that’s a problem. That to me is like a crisis. And that’s one of the things I’m hoping the settlement can help us deal with.

MARTIN: Charlie Baker, thank you so much for speaking with us.

BAKER: It’s nice to be with you.