NCAA President Charlie Baker.
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A multi-billion-dollar industry driven by people who can’t see a dime of it is about to change.
For years, many believed that colleges were exploiting student-athletes. But just last week, the NCAA reached a $2.8 billion settlement with five major conferences, paving the way for schools to pay athletes directly for games.
This comes after the system changed and athletes could start making money off their name, image and likeness.
All circumstances have been considered Host Juana Summers talks with the man now overseeing college sports, NCAA President Charlie Baker, about this monumental shift.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
Juana Summers: I want to start with an update on the $2.8 billion settlement that the NCAA and the major sports conferences accepted last week. While it still needs to be approved by a judge, on the surface it appears to be a landmark shift in college sports. Why reconciliation?
Charlie Baker: I think the status quo has created a lack of stability and predictability for just about everyone involved in college sports over the years, maybe even decades, at least at the highest level.
I think for us to find a way to get out of the status quo and create what I call some predictability – especially for Division I leagues and schools – that’s also a better way in our opinion Way, by creating this to support student-athletes which is a legal framework that can be monitored and enforced, it basically gives the NCAA and its members 10 years to repay their losses. And in a way, it unites us all during this decade to work together and stay the course.
Summers: On the surface, $2.8 billion sounds like a lot of cash. But if the lawsuit goes to trial, the potential price tag could far exceed that figure. How much of it is about staying away, avoiding financial ruin, staying solvent?
Baker: Well, I think from my perspective – remember, I’ve only been here for about a year – trying to find what I described as a proactive approach to dealing with issues related to student-athlete compensation seems to be what I’m going to do Take a better road. Fortunately, after having a series of conversations and discussions with the so-called Power Five conference and some of its leadership and plaintiffs – you know, these guys have been arguing this over and over in court for a long time – I’m glad We were able to find a way to reach a settlement and submit the settlement as a proposal to the court. And hope the court will accept it.
The $2.8 billion settlement sets the stage for major changes in college sports.
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Summers: This does seem to be a blow to the NCAA’s longstanding model of considering college athletes as amateurs. In light of the settlement, one might argue that amateurism is dead in college sports, given that student-athletes now have more financial autonomy over their name, image and likeness. Do you think this is fair?
Baker: No. But as someone who has been involved in college sports for a long time, there are still a lot of young people who will be in school and on campus playing college sports and learning all the lessons that come from playing college sports. Some do it with an athletic scholarship, some just do it for the love of the sport.
I think the most important thing I should say about this is, you have 500,000 student-athletes, 19,000 teams, 1,100 schools. The schools involved in this settlement discussion are all schools in D1, and the schools named, the so-called five named conferences, represent about 68 or 70 schools. So while it’s definitely a big deal, I do think college sports will continue to be diverse in terms of how it’s run, how it’s organized, et cetera.
Summers: The settlement also comes with another directive, information about a new revenue-sharing model for student-athletes. This raises a lot of questions, but I want to ask female athletes whether they will be compensated fairly and how that will be achieved. Can you talk about this?
Baker: Everyone is assuming there’s a Title IX element to this, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about. Historically, this has been decided at the campus or conference level. I certainly think everyone anticipates that this will be part of the way people do that in the future. One benefit of this is that it can take five to six months for a judge to reach a settlement. In fact, I don’t think the moving forward part that you mentioned is going to start until fiscal year 2025-26. So there’s been a lot of time to work through some of the details on that, and obviously making sure that Title IX stuff is taken care of is part of that.
Summers: I want to talk about prop betting in college sports. We’re talking here about those side bets that don’t necessarily have to do with the outcome of the game itself, but rather everything from the color of Gatorade to who might score a touchdown. I know you and the NCAA have been urging states to ban proprietary betting on college sports, saying it increases the pressure on college athletes. Explain to us why this is important.
Baker: You know, my problem is that it puts student-athletes in a position where people are betting on their performance as individuals rather than their performance as a team member. I can tell you, the amount of messages these kids receive through social media, whether it’s through direct messages or content targeted at them on traditional social media, is staggering. We hired a company to actually track the high volume of public posts targeting players, coaches and officials at the tournament, and then if we saw something particularly egregious, we would notify the platform. If our matter is truly outrageous, we will notify the authorities. I can tell you, the things people would say to a student-athlete who doesn’t live up to their promise, no matter what it is, are terrible. There are no other words to describe it.
Summers: When your predecessor, Mark Emmert, announced he was quitting the job, sports illustrated Describes the job of serving as NCAA president as an “almost impossible task.” You are now a little over a year old. what do you think?
Baker: I came into this job with an inherent appreciation for the complexity of making decisions in a large and complex organization where there are many perspectives like this.
I hope we can continue to build on our record of supporting student-athletes and ensure that kids in all three divisions have future opportunities. I’m only a year into the job, but one day someone must have said to me, “Having fun?” and I said, “Sometimes!”
But I think the biggest thing for me is that if you come from government and politics and health care, which are the areas I’ve been in before, you’re used to a lot of people having opinions. Yelling. So I’m pretty happy with that.
