Hot-seat watch on for NCAA president Mark Emmert

NCAA president Mark Emmert called for a summit of Division I schools and said he expects changes in how college athletics’ top division operates to come within the year, per Mark Alesia of the Indianapolis Star.

Emmert echoed sentiments that have been expressed during college football media days over the past couple of weeks. There has been a recent groundswell of support from power-conference commissioners to make changes to Division I, with many calling for a split. Asking the richest school at the top and schools at the bottom, with far less money to operate, to play by the same rules doesn’t make a lot of sense, and Emmert acknowledged that the NCAA likely needs to adjust its policies.

Mark Emmert’s had a pretty rough year. The organization he presides over is in the midst of a legal battle to preserve its free labor market, his competence has been questioned at every turn, and dang it, people just like making fun of him. His job performance has been so poor that we discovered that he was terrible at his previous jobs too.

So with all that in mind, of course he’s still drawing a discouragingly large salary. Emmert made $1.7 million dollars during his first year on the job in 2011, according to USA Today, and I’m going to take a wild guess and assume he isn’t making any less in 2013. His compensation breaks down as such:

NCAA president Mark Emmert might very well be the least popular man in college sports, and a damning story by Pete Thamel reveals that even those in power and employed by the NCAA don’t have the best perception of the president.

Thamel portrays Emmert as all form and little function, more taken to sweeping cosmetic reform and talk than actually getting things accomplished. Worse, that form is often poorly received -- Thamel talks of a meeting with a dramatic, strobe-light filled intro video Emmert held for all NCAA employees to a series of buzzwords called “One Team One Future,” right before changing everybody’s screen savers to that phrase. and the things he actually does accomplish, like hitting Penn State with crippling sanctions, often seem ill-advised.

The investigator in question, Rich Johanningmeier, is now retired. He met with Dye twice in 2011 to discuss the allegations against Miami. According to the incident report, Johanningmeier used inappropriate tactics during those meetings, going so far as to threaten Dye’s college eligibility:

Coral Gables police have not yet launched an investigation into the allegations alleged by Dye.

And it was one long, sonorous fart noise, the frustrated display of a man growing aware he’s on his way off of the highest perch he’ll ever reach. Mark Emmert began his time with a lengthy introductory comment, which revealed very little and which many took as a way to cut into the time he’d have to spend answering tough questions about the botched Miami investigation, Penn State and the Freeh report, Syracuse’s annual scandal news, the latest from Auburn, the Mike Rice episode and so forth.

He did have to answer those questions, though not very many of them and not to anyone’s satisfaction. Anything wrong with the NCAA’s enforcement methods has already been bathed in light and corrected, in Emmert’s view, and any further necessary corrections are his responsibility.

Brent Schrotenboer wrote a profile of NCAA president Mark Emmert for USA Today, and it’s necessary reading material.

As many call for Emmert’s ouster over the NCAA’s mishandling of the Miami investigation, Schrotenboer looked into the past of college sports’ head honcho, and it isn’t pretty. During his time as Montana State’s provost, UConn’s chancellor, and president of LSU and Washington, the organizations he ran got into ethical trouble, but Emmert managed to escape in each scenario, ending up at one of the cushiest and most prestigious jobs in his field.

Let’s get right to it.

1. The NCAA’s investigation into extravagant inmate Nevin Shapiro’s involvement with the Miami Hurricanes was derailed by the NCAA’s own investigation, which is the kind of thing that happens to an organization overseen by a horse.

The NCAA’s footing in the University of Miami investigation gets weaker and weaker, as the Miami Herald reports that even more unethical mistakes than previously believed were made by the organization as they attempted to unearth violations -- great news for the school as they try to get the case against them thrown out.

The NCAA has already admitted that it messed up in the Miami case. After unethical conduct was revealed -- mainly revolving around paying witness Nevin Shapiro’s lawyer and overstepping their subpoena boundaries -- the NCAA released a report on their missteps and the association fired its vice president of enforcement. However, they pressed on with the case.

When NCAA interim enforcement director Joe Duncan met with enforcement staff before starting his new job on Monday, he met a group of people both angered and confused by the actions of NCAA president Mark Emmert.

Emotions ran high in that meeting, a source told CBS Sports -- there was shouting, there even was some crying. The members of the enforcement staff believe they’ve been mistreated by Emmert and that their reputation has been damaged to the extent that it will make their jobs more difficult in the future.

NCAA executive committee chair Lou Anna K. Simon released a statement on Saturday endorsing the work of president Mark Emmert. The organization’s backing of its president comes amid a swirling of controversy involving the NCAA’s decision-making process in the Penn State and Miami investigations.

Simon, who also serves as the president of Michigan State University, touched on the policy reform on which the executive committee and board of directors are working, in addition to showing the governing bodies’ support of Emmert:

As long as the NCAA is predicated on preserving amateurism, it will never have a functional enforcement arm. It says that it’s going to clean up its enforcement department, but that’s a lie. Sure, the names will change, but the bullshit will remain the same.

NCAA investigators don’t have a lot of legal power, so they’re forced to find information through extralegal means. As I noted in my explanation of why the Miami scandal is the NCAA’s worst deed yet, the NCAA doesn’t have subpoena power. That’s good, because as I noted, its rules should not carry the force of law. The problem with that this lack of power is that investigators will always be tempted to push the limits of what they can do. Investigators are a naturally zealous bunch, and that sometimes leads to ignoring the advice of counsel.

It would be nice to just blame the person in charge, because that would make the NCAA something effective, merely a noble franchise misdirected by inept, buttery hands fumbling the controls of a potentially fine machine.

That would be nice. It would be nice to imagine Mark Emmert--the man who earns $1.6 million a year to slap the controls of the NCAA around like an ape frantically smashing the buttons of a nuclear missile silo--as someone competent. It would also be inaccurate, since the NCAA is a cash-spitting brain fluke infecting anyone who touches it, and like most parasitic organisms has more willing hosts than you can count.

Hello, non-lawyer friends. By now you’ve heard that the NCAA is conducting an internal investigation after discovering that its enforcement staff worked with Nevin Shapiro’s attorneys to depose witnesses on their behalf. In case you’re a non-lawyer you might not know what any of that means, I’m going to conduct a Q&A with my old buddy the fake non-lawyer to explain everything to you.

Q: So what did the NCAA enforcement staff do?

The NCAA investigation of the University of Miami may have been tainted, so for now the Notice of Allegations for the Hurricanes will have to be put on hold. The NCAA announced that there was a potential issue regarding improper conduct. Former members of the NCAA enforcement staff reportedly obtained information for the investigation via a bankruptcy proceeding.

This proceeding did not involve the NCAA and the organization cannot obtain testimony outside the usual enforcement process. The NCAA lacks the power of subpoena and should not have access to the information it gained from this part of its investigation, meaning NCAA president Mark Emmert now has to answer questions about whether the whole case against Miami could be tossed.

And it gets even more amazing than that:

It’s amazing how taking down a statue can undo so much. The minute that despised statue of Joe Paterno came down, the event unspooled like the fishing line off a coil. Men who were once children suddenly became unraped; the veil of distance between them and the world fell, and they instantly became fitter, happier men.

Lawsuits evaporated in the drawers of legal firms. Columns excoriating Penn State as a feckless den of toadying football cultists disintegrated, leaving blank pixels and empty news columns in their place.

Mark Emmert has been the NCAA’s president since just 2010, but that reportedly could be just about the length of his term. Sports by Brooks has the word:

Before taking over the NCAA, Emmert was courted for major leadership roles by LSU, North Carolina, Vanderbilt and others. He served as Washington’s president from 2004 through 2010, previously working at UConn, Montana State and Colorado, along with said LSU chancellorship.