The general public doesn’t trust the NCAA ... according to the president of the NCAA. Mark Emmert spoke on reform in college basketball on Monday and offered a damning personal assessment of his organization’s ability to do its job.
Even the NCAA is fully aware no one trusts the NCAA
President Mark Emmert is finally admitting the system is broken.
Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
Emmert cited the following statistics gathered recently by the NCAA:
- 79 percent of people said big schools put money ahead of student-athletes
- 69 percent said those big universities are more of a problem than solution
- 51 percent said the NCAA is part of the problem
Perhaps the most damning statement from Emmert:
“We can’t go into the next basketball season without having made some pretty significant changes that restore people’s confidence in, not just basketball, but in the enterprise.”
College basketball season is basically already here — we see you Kentucky, getting that big exhibition win against Morehead State — so Emmert will have a tough time with that. But Emmert certainly seems serious when he says college basketball’s recent issues “requires a direct response.”
There are two big takeaways from this:
No kidding no one trusts the NCAA
Emmert just said what everyone is thinking. It’s only notable because .... he’s the president of the organization he’s saying it about.
The NCAA has given the public a lot to be skeptical about lately. Most notably:
- Upholding an ineligibility ruling on an NC State freshman because he had the audacity of going to class while committed to Ohio State
- Letting North Carolina skate on decades of paper classes just because normal students could also enroll in those classes
- That whole FBI thing
It’s clear the FBI scandal is the inflection point in everything Emmert said on Monday. Because ....
Emmert didn’t always think the system was broken
The NCAA has been very good to Emmert. He took home about $2 million in salary according to his most recent tax returns. As Jay Bilas pointed out, he wasn’t always saying stuff like this. Quite the opposite.
You can find a million examples of hypocrisy with a simple Google search. The system was never fair in the first place. The only people who weren’t saying it were those like Emmert who were making tons of money off of it.
Does this mean we’ll see college athletes be able to make money when their jersey is sold? Does it mean they can charge for an autograph? The one-and-done rule (which is an NBA rule) certainly looks like it’s on the way out. That’s just the start of it.
The NCAA has always been completely overmatched. Now even the people in charge are realizing it.
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