NCAA President Charlie Baker on March Madness Expansion, College Football and 5-In-5 Eligibility

Andy Katz: All right. Charlie, you’re a couple of years into the job and so much is happening in college sports. One thing I’ve always found is that there’s this assumption that the president of the NCAA is equal to a commissioner of one of the major sports.

Since you’ve taken over this job, what do you think has been the biggest misperception of the responsibilities and the power of the NCAA president?

Charlie Baker: Well, I think the biggest difference, if you want to compare it to a commissioner, is that a commissioner has a much smaller constituency than the NCAA president has. That’s point number one. You could take all of the major professional sports teams and put them together, and they wouldn’t add up to as many teams as the Power Four conferences have in two or three of those sports. And we have way more schools than that. I say to people all the time that we have a 95-5 situation, where five percent of the kids playing college sports make up 95 percent of the news. But the other 95 percent are still playing college sports and benefiting from what you get by doing that.

The second thing I’d say is we really are a membership-driven, decision-making organization. The president and the people who work in the national office have roles and responsibilities, but we are basically in the business of facilitating and enabling the membership. We can certainly make suggestions and offer advice and ideas based on what we know. But at the end of the day, it’s the committees that make the decisions. And the committees across all three divisions are basically made up of college presidents, conference commissioners, ADs, professors. It’s a job where I have a significant amount of influence, but I don’t have a lot of authority, which, frankly, is a little different from some of the other jobs I’ve had in my career. That took a little while to get used to.

Andy: Charlie, a follow-up:

Is the legal team that represents the NCAA actually representing the membership’s legislation when it goes in front of judges in courtrooms across the country?

Baker: That’s a fair representation. We talk to the boards across all three divisions on a pretty regular basis about rules and policy and litigation and everything else. And there’s no place where the NCAA is represented in court where we’re not there on behalf of some part of the membership’s rulemaking and decision-making.

Seth: Yeah, it’s a lot different from your previous job as the governor of Massachusetts, where you had the ability to actually write laws, sign laws, veto legislation. Sometimes it’s hard to understand. We see what’s in the news — and we’ll get into all the five-in-five cases and what’s happening in Congress — but sometimes I wonder if there’s a direct correlation between what we’re seeing dominate the news and what is actually your priority as president of the NCAA and what you spend your time on.

If we were to project ahead, say, the next six to eight weeks, is it getting the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) through Congress that’s going to occupy most of your time? What are your priorities going to be in the near to mid future?

Baker: Well, certainly the PCSA is a big deal, primarily because it creates a national framework around a lot of stuff that we would really benefit from having a national framework around. But we also have all of our fall championships currently on the docket. We’ve sold an extraordinary number of seats already for the volleyball championship, which is in San Antonio. And I’ll say today on your show that I think we’re probably going to sell more than 30,000 tickets a night for that Final Four, which is a pretty good number.

We’ll also be launching, sometime in November, a universally available website that’s going to have all the historical traffic on the portal. So you’re going to be able to look at that data and figure out if somebody went in the portal, where they landed or if they didn’t land. You’ll be able to do it by conference, by school, by sport. Part of the reason for putting that together was I hear from a lot of kids who tell me that they get all this advice from people about, “Well, if you go in the portal, blah, blah, blah.” But it’s very hard for them to know whether what they’ve been told is accurate or true. One way for them to judge that would be to go to this website and look up, “Well, what happened to the kids I played against last year that were kind of like me? Where did they land when they went in the portal? How many minutes are they playing this year?” I think it’ll provide a tremendous amount of transparency in a world where we need more.

We also just finished a two-year grind on trying to put together data on what actually happens to all the kids in Division I and Division II over their life cycle academically when they’re playing sports. We broke it up into the kids who don’t transfer at all, the kids who transfer once and the kids who transfer more than once. What were the graduation rates for those kids? Did their graduation rate go down based on the number of times they transferred? And what can we do with that information now that we have it, to try to make sure kids don’t end up on the wrong end of the graduation question when they get to the end of their college eligibility?

There’s a bunch of things we’re doing that don’t get much attention that I think are important to the membership, and rightly so. But obviously the stuff that makes news is usually the championships, the construct of the regular season, which is always interesting to people, and generally speaking, a lot of the stuff that’s going on in what I would call the public domain, which means the courts and Congress.

Andy: Charlie, I’m old enough to remember when there was a lot of chatter about how unfair it was when underclassmen made the decision to go into the NBA Draft, got bad advice and then didn’t get selected. And here we are in June, and they had no place to go. There was a lot of chatter like, “Hey, they should be allowed to come back.” 

But then of course, people take advantage of it: Well, what if you went to training camp? What if he just played in a scrimmage in Vegas or something? But you came down pretty strong, which was great, and I applaud you for making it very clear that if you’ve signed a professional contract in the NBA, you are not eligible. It’s especially important as some schools are trying to get around that legally. 

Take us back to that time earlier this summer. What went into your decision regarding NBA contracts and eligibility?

Baker: I think the big difference between now and four or five years ago is that the kind of young people you’re talking about are represented. They’re all represented, as they should be, and getting good advice from the people representing them. I think there’s a blurring of the lines between professional athletes and student-athletes, who in many cases are playing in environments where they have significant opportunities to benefit financially through revenue sharing and NIL.

And by the way, I made an NIL proposal six months after I got this job. I’ve been a big believer that doing something in the revenue-sharing space was long overdue. But I do think we need some sort of a bright line there, because anybody who’s played professionally, anybody who’s been part of a professional organization, will tell you that it’s really, really different from playing in college. I know people who were good enough to get into a professional football training camp, and they said what they learned in that brief period of time was like nothing they ever learned playing college — and some of these guys played in real big-time college programs. That’s part of the reason why we went down the road we did on the professionalism issue. Everybody’s represented. There is revenue sharing now at the collegiate level. That’s a good thing. But the pros are a different place.

That’s also part of the reason why, when the membership was talking about how to reframe collegiate eligibility, they focused on this age-based approach. Because the other thing they and we have been hearing for the last couple of years — mostly because of waivers and all the other stuff we had in place — is that there are too many kids who are 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 still playing college sports. And that’s not fair to the 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds who are supposed to be playing college sports as well. We are in a messy transition here — I’m completely willing to acknowledge and admit that — but I think it’s directionally correct, I guess is what I would say.

Seth: Yeah. It’s chaotic now, but it’s clearly better than the previous system, where student-athletes were not getting compensated at all. I think the NCAA, frankly, and you in particular, are sometimes unfairly criticized by people who, unlike the three of us, aren’t living in the weeds on this stuff. But there is one area of criticism that I not only think is fair, Charlie, but have advocated myself, and that is this 5-in-5 rule now being litigated in the courts.

People seem to agree that this is a good idea, for the reason you just said. If the NCAA had passed that rule in January, it could have applied to the high school class of 2022, and everything would have been pretty clean. Or if you all had waited until the fall, when it’s too late to enroll and join the team — it would have been unfortunate for those guys not to have that fifth year, but it would have been too late for them to do anything about it. For that rule to be passed in June seems to me literally the perfectly wrong time to do it, because now it opens you up to the limbo of people who can still enroll and still join their teams if they get this access through the courts.

Is it fair to say that you all either misjudged the timing on the 5-in-5, or didn’t anticipate that these athletes and their lawyers would have this level of success getting injunctions? Would you like a do-over on the timing?

Baker: Well, the board talked a lot about this and eventually landed here. They were working on the theory that no matter where they landed on this, they would be criticized. If you waited until now, there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that we would have been sued long before now by people looking for an extra year, simply because the whole idea of an age-based eligibility system with five years of hard eligibility was going to get challenged in court anyway. And then we would have been in a position as an organization and a membership where we’d basically be saying, “Oh, gee, we don’t know. What is our answer on that question?” Which would have looked duplicitous to many.

The second thing: When the board talked about this, they were basically of the mind that when they came to a conclusion about what they wanted the policy to be, they should implement it. And then the question became, how do you make sure that everybody gets what they’re entitled to? And this is where I have a real bone to pick with the folks who say the entering class of ’22 deserved another year. They got exactly what they were expecting to get and what they were promised when they enrolled, which was five years to play four, with a lot of waivers and exemptions for all kinds of specific circumstances and situations.

The kids who are enrolled for the fall of this year get something different. They get five years of eligibility. The clock starts when you enter school or when you turn 19, and it turns off when you turn 24. You don’t have the plethora of waivers and exemptions and exceptions we had before. And one of the things no one talks about: There are kids who came in with the class of ’22 who got hurt, who lost a family member, some other extenuating circumstance, who are still playing this year, because they didn’t exhaust their four years of eligibility in their five-, six- or seven-year window. And there are also a whole bunch of people in the classes of ’23, ’24 and ’25 entering who are going to basically play out the string on whichever piece of that equation they were promised.

But this idea that there was some magic time at which the membership should have made a decision — I think they probably did the right thing. As they said, we’re probably going to get sued by somebody somewhere anyway for changing the rule. We should just make the decision at the point in time when we actually know what it looks like and how it’s going to work, and make sure that every class, to the extent possible, gets what they were promised when they started. And I think it’s fair to say the membership did a pretty good job of delivering on that.

Are we in court in a whole bunch of places? Yes. Is that a surprise? Not to me. I was in court from the moment I showed up here on issues around eligibility. And the other thing I would say is: there are 75,000 kids playing Division I college sports right now. About 350 of them are tangled up in these court cases. Since you guys are basketball, you’re playing in a much different space than almost every other sport. The vast majority of the kids and schools challenging the old eligibility rule are basketball players and basketball schools, period. Different from everybody else.

Seth: Andy, if I could just jump in. I’ve heard a lot of people — I was just at Big 12 Media Day, and even more people there were saying — that you all did this timing on purpose, to create chaos on purpose, so that Congress would pass this legislation.

Was the timing intended to create chaos? Are you playing 12-dimensional chess? Can you cop to doing this right now?

Baker: We are not playing 12-dimensional chess. In fact, people literally wanted to do what they thought would be the best way to guarantee that everybody gets what they were expecting to get. The problem I have with everybody who says, “Why don’t you just give the ’22 kids another year?” is that the kids who entered in ’23, ’24, ’25 and ’26 would have been dramatically hurt by that. I’d much rather spend the money we spend in court on almost anything else. But when I think about all the schools that left roster spots open and didn’t give them to kids who were expecting them, I don’t feel that bad about what we’re doing or what side we’re on.

Andy: The other thing that has been a criticism — look, for years I did the NCAA Social Series. I talked to student-athletes on the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee in Divisions I, II and III. And then we saw it at the news conference, where they were standing behind the coaches. There are student-athletes that have been involved and engaged on a variety of topics.

Can you dismiss the myth that student-athletes have been somehow boxed out of the discussion on what is going on? What’s the truth?

Baker: Well, first of all, one of the things we did two years ago, implemented last year, was we shrank the size of the Division I governance model. We got rid of about 80 committees. We shrank the size of all of our committees. There was a lot of frustration when I got to the NCAA about how long it took stuff to get processed, how complicated the process was and how hard it was to figure out how something got from the beginning to the end. So we put together a working group that had, I think, 18 people on it. They represented all the various parts of Division I, including a bunch of student-athletes. They spent basically eight or nine months — they met in person a lot, they met virtually a lot — and they dramatically streamlined the number of committees we had. You couldn’t have a committee with more than about 20 people on it. We used to have committees with 50. And a whole bunch of things about the way we make legislation and rules got changed, in what I would say is a positive way.

The other thing that happened as a result is we increased the number of student-athletes on every single one of those committees at the same time we were shrinking the size of the committees, which meant their vote was actually worth a lot more. And they were involved in all of those conversations right up until the end. And they voted, along with the other members of the committee, to support both the change in the eligibility policy and the timing associated with it.

I meet with the kids all the time — and I call them kids because I’m almost 70, so I think at that point you have the right. They’re the best part of the job. They’re really smart, they’re really engaged, and they’re just really good human beings. I’ve said to our folks on a number of occasions, after a bunch of these committee meetings, that some of the most well-thought-out and well-considered positions I heard came from the student-athletes. And one of the things I like about the Protect College Sports Act is that it would actually require additional representation for student-athletes across all of our committees, which I think would be a pretty good thing.

Seth: So this is a good transition to my question about the Protect College Sports Act. There are a lot of really good things in there for student-athletes, including doubling the amount of revenue-sharing money that schools can spend. Because the legislation creates huge retention incentives, it can at least lower the incentive to transfer, because, much like you see in the NBA, schools can pay more for guys on their own team. But it is an indisputable fact that the legislation puts a cap on the amount of revenue a school can pay its athletes, and no cap on coaches or university presidents or philosophy professors or anybody else. The student-athletes, at the legislative and lobbying level, did not have nearly the same involvement in crafting that legislation, which now puts a cap on their compensation and not that of the men and women who are coaching them.

Why is that fair?

Baker: Well, first of all, you’re right to point out that the bill actually creates a bigger revenue-sharing model than the one negotiated in the House settlement. In fact, it more than doubles it. There’s nothing in the bill that changes the way third-party NIL works. Real third-party NIL deals — you can still do as many of those as you want. And all the other benefits made available to student-athletes — scholarships, training tables, summer school, all that stuff — still happen tax-free, the way they always have, which people forget about. But that’s real money. If you add it all up, in Division I it’s probably going to be somewhere between $5 billion and $6 billion in resources made available to student-athletes under that bill.

And as I said before, it also dramatically expands their representation on all of the decision-making committees at the NCAA, which I think will make a big difference. It also significantly increases the size and scale of the post-eligibility health insurance program we put in place a few years ago to benefit student-athletes across all three divisions.

I say to people all the time, I signed hundreds of bills when I was governor, and I don’t think I ever signed one that I thought was perfect. But if you were to ask me, does this create a better environment for all student-athletes than the one we’ve lived in up until now? My answer would be yes. If you just focus on one thing, there’s always room to argue that something could be better. I can’t dispute that. But for a lot of programs, they’ll be in a position where as much as 60 percent, maybe more, of their athletic budgets could be going directly to hard-dollar and soft-dollar support for their student-athletes.

Andy: So let’s deal with the reality here. Congress is not coming back till after the midterms. It’s going to be a lame-duck session when that happens. We’ve done the Senate. We kind of know where President Trump stands on it.

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What has to happen with the House, hopefully in a bipartisan way, to get this done?

Baker: Well, one of the great challenges we have is the polarization that exists within society generally these days, and in politics in particular. I’ve had people say to me that we’ve now gotten to the point where what kind of car you drive, what music you listen to, what movies you go to, what you watch on streaming — it’s all become red or blue. As a guy who spent a good part of my life in politics and public service, I’m kind of bummed about that.

One of the things I appreciate most about this bill is that a whole bunch of Republican senators and Democratic senators worked really hard together and gave up a whole bunch of things that were really important to them to reach a compromise and get a 77-22 vote out of the Senate. When you think about how few pieces of legislation have passed either chamber during this session, outside of the really giant appropriations bills you have to pass or the government shuts down, I don’t think anything’s gotten that kind of vote. So I think people should be pleased by that.

In terms of the process in the House — I’ve been through a few lame-duck sessions myself. Usually, there’s a bunch of things each chamber has passed that are sitting in the other chamber. And typically they end up in a conversation like, “We’d really like to see the thing we passed that’s sitting in your part of government make it all the way through. If you’re willing to do that, we’ll be willing to do this.” I know that doesn’t sound glorious and policy-centric, but that’s usually the way lame-duck sessions work, and it isn’t a bad thing. It just is. The compressed time frame and the desire to get certain things through usually becomes the hydraulic pressure to get something done. And I’m hoping we can work with our membership and with folks in the House and the Senate to move this forward under that kind of approach.

There’s really not going to be a huge opportunity to do a lot of amending and changing, because those processes take a really long time. Even stuff that moves fast takes a long time. So the opportunity is really going to be more like, “We’d really like you guys in the Senate to pass this,” and the Senate saying to the House, “We’ll do that, but only if you’re willing to sign on to this” — which would be something like our bill. That happens post-election in practically every legislative body anywhere. So I’m assuming that will happen, and the question becomes, can we make sure our bill is one of the pieces that becomes part of one of those trades?

Seth: Well, I admire your optimism on the workings of Congress. That spirit of comity coming out of an election season is, I’m sure, going to work in everybody’s favor. I will admit — and we had Senator Cruz on our show when this thing first got launched — I would never have predicted that it could have gotten through the Senate, and that it would have gotten 77 votes. So I’m happy to be wrong about that. 

I do not share your optimism, either about the lame duck or, especially, in January, if certain changes are made in the chambers that we anticipate, that the math is gonna… You’re just going to have different people in the building, no matter which party’s controlling. 

So I don’t share your optimism, but I’m glad you’re optimistic. That’s part of your job. But part of me almost feels like, Charlie — look, the odds are we’re not going to get anything out of Congress. I understand the effort has to be made until that is done. My feeling is, if that is the endgame, the faster we get there, the better, because I’m curious what a post-Congress world might look like. You’re not going to hear me agreeing with Tommy Tuberville very often, but I wish they had just done the skinny bill, which may have simplified things and stayed away from the money.

But I do see in what happened between LSU and the SEC a glimmer of light at what that pathway might look like. That conferences doing what they think is right, and essentially doing what this legislation is trying to do can work. Maybe there’s a lower legal threshold, because it’s only about, “If you don’t like the way we do business, go to a different conference.”

I know the federal route is option A, but can you see conference governance in this world as a feasible and workable plan B?

Baker: I think a couple of things. One is the Sorsby thing in the Big 12 was another example. We had the same rule nationally that the SEC had with respect to eligibility, where they went to court on the two football players and the basketball player. And we had the same rule around gambling that the Big 12 had. But their ability to take that one and run with it made a big difference in how that played out in the confines of their conference.

I’ve said for a while that I’m not wedded to, quote-unquote, “all rules need to be national.” In fact, we set up a group called the decentralization group, and it’s got a bunch of members on it. One of the things it needs to talk about is what sorts of things could be done at the conference level and don’t need to be done at the national level, and what you really need to have national, like a national championship. Eligibility, for example, is a pretty hard one to do at a conference level. You need one set of rules around eligibility. 

But we also agreed to set up the CSC — and we help pay for that — which was set up specifically to deal with all the issues associated with the House settlement: roster caps, third-party NIL, rev share. So I have no problem with the idea that we should be thinking about a model that isn’t monolithic, where a bunch of stuff gets done in places where maybe it belongs, given the new world we live in. And I think you’re going to see us work pretty hard with the membership to pursue a bunch of those ideas.

Andy: Charlie, you mentioned the championship coming up in volleyball that could have a sellout. We’ve got the CBS-TNT deal in men’s basketball until 2032. The ESPN deal is relatively new with all the other Olympic sports.

What is the health of the television contracts right now, especially beyond revenue sports?

Baker: We had better attendance and better viewership across just about everything in our championship portfolio — and not just in Division I, but in Division II and Division III. I think our fan database is helping with that. We’re pretty good now at being able to identify and target people, either by geography or by the sports they bought tickets to before. The open rate on our emails to people about buying tickets to one of our championships is 55 percent. That’s pretty much unheard of. And that fan database has made a huge difference in a whole bunch of championships in terms of both attendance and interest.

I think the big thing we need to do with respect to both the ESPN deal and the Skydance deal — which is now what the CBS-WBD deal was — is start thinking about that now, because there are all kinds of deals coming up over the next five years or so that involve all sorts of sports. And that whole world is way bigger than it was when this thing was originally negotiated. The technology, the move away from broadcast — there’s a lot going on there. I think you can expect us to put together a working group to start talking about how this should work, certainly in the next 12 months, even though it’s very far away.

The other thing I would say is we’re pretty encouraged by how well we’ve been able to sell championship tickets at the regional level, the Elite Eight level, the Final Four level, across a lot of different sports. We currently have a bid cycle starting for a whole bunch of our host sites going forward. We’re going to continue to raise the bar with respect to what we want out of our hosts, but we’re also going to come to the table with a bunch of things I think our hosts are going to appreciate.

Part of it is that I want to support all these other sports and see them get bigger and better and more successful. But part of it is also that I want to prove the case, as we head into the ESPN renegotiation, that these sports mean something and are valuable, and that they have audiences. If you do a better job of finding and enlightening that audience, you can get them to both attend and watch. I say to people all the time, it’s crazy to me that you can get such incredible turnout for the Olympics in certain sports. We’ll never get that kind of turnout, but if you look at a lot of those Olympic sports, it’s a lot of the same people. They’re just wearing a different jersey. So we should be able to figure out how to make those way more interesting and exciting, with much bigger audiences, both in attendance and viewership. We’re now having enough success in some of these sports that I think three or four years from now we’re going to be in a pretty good place. And I think that’s going to make the ESPN piece a really interesting bid cycle.

Andy: It’s a great time to be a sports fan. For folks watching us right now — I know we’re all college basketball fans — watch the Women’s College World Series sometime. I’m not just saying that because my two sons went to Texas and the Longhorns won it, but it is an absolutely riveting event. But before I let you go, Charlie:

I’m going to ask you about the one championship you don’t run: football. They’re going to 24 teams. Do you like it?

Baker: Look, they still make all the rules inside the NCAA, which is kind of interesting. But what I would say is we went from 68 to 76 in the basketball tournament, and we kept the calendar, which I think was really important to people. It still starts at the same time and ends at the same time. A lot of people were nervous that we’d have calendar creep. But no, we didn’t have calendar creep. We had bracket creep. So I thought that was good.

We’ll see how it plays out, but I’m going to take the word of so many of my colleagues in the college football space, who basically said a bigger tournament means people will be willing to take more chances during the regular season with respect to how they schedule. And if they do that, you could have weekends like the one we had last week every weekend all the way through the fall, which would be pretty cool.

Just as a fan, I’m going to miss the SEC Championship. I always thought the pageantry and the intensity and the fan bases — all of it was amazing. But you could also see a couple of Group of Six teams getting into this, which I think would be great. I think JMU proved that they could play. Boise State certainly did, too.

Before I got this job — I’d been announced, but I hadn’t taken the job yet — I went out and talked to kids. You and I have talked before about sports betting; that’s really where I learned how big a challenge sports betting was for kids. But the other thing was, I’d say to them, “What does the NCAA mean to you?” And across all three divisions, they would all say the same thing: a chance to play in a championship tournament. And I’d be like, “Really? Tell me why.” And they would say it was the first time they had a chance to test their ability against teams they weren’t familiar with. “I’ve been playing against the same kids for the past three years. And when you get into the tournament, you’re no longer playing in that same pond.” Now you’re suddenly getting a chance to see if you’re as good as anybody else on the East Coast, as good as anybody else in the Midwest. And God forbid, if you actually make it to the Sweet 16 or the Elite Eight, all of a sudden you realize you might be as good as anybody else in the country. Their faces would just light up when they talked about that experience.

So as somebody who thinks this is supposed to be all about the kids, I’m basically all for giving a whole bunch of young people a chance to play in an NCAA tournament who wouldn’t get that chance any other way.