The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which has struggled to govern the shifting landscape of college sports amid rapid changes involving endorsement deals, large media contracts and conference realignment, on Thursday named Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts as its next president.
Baker has been the governor of Massachusetts since 2015, with his second term ending in January. He will take over as president of the N.C.A.A. in March, the same month the organization stages its signature Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Baker will replace Mark Emmert, who will serve as a consultant to the N.C.A.A. until June.
Baker, 66, has some familiarity with college sports. He played basketball at Harvard, including a season with the varsity team in 1977-78. His wife, Lauren, was a gymnast at Northwestern and their two sons played Division III football.
But Baker has not worked in sports in any capacity; he has worked in government and the health industry for all of his professional life. Still, the N.C.A.A. needed “a leader with a different set of skills,” said Mary-Beth A. Cooper, the president of Springfield College in Massachusetts, who served on the search committee.
“I must say that when I was first approached about this, my initial reaction was that I was not exactly what you would call a traditional candidate,” Baker said in a news conference Thursday. He added that “the enormous transition associated with policy and government and rules and regulations” made him believe he could handle the role.
While he was an unexpected and untraditional choice for the job, his experience in government could help the N.C.A.A. navigate a time when its power in Washington and U.S. statehouses has seemingly diminished and as its pleas for federal legislation to protect its business model from legal challenges have at times been unsuccessful.
Lawmakers at many levels have become steadily more vocal about making major changes to the foundations of college sports, where athletes are generally compensated by universities for only the costs of attendance. Endorsement income, known as name, image, and likeness deals, is arranged separately between athletes and outside businesses, and the N.C.A.A. capitulated on the issue only after several states passed laws allowing student-athletes the new way to earn money from their fame.
“The N.C.A.A. president needs to be able to balance competing priorities, inspire a shared vision and create a broad sense of trust,” said the former Duke and N.B.A. basketball player Grant Hill, who was a part of the search committee. He added, “Charlie Baker has demonstrated the type of results-oriented, bipartisan approach that we will need to bolster the well-being of student-athletes, realize the opportunities and overcome the challenges facing the N.C.A.A.”
In December 2021, Baker, a Republican, announced that he would not run for re-election and said that he would focus on pandemic recovery rather than campaigning. Despite being a Republican, Baker regularly defied President Donald J. Trump, saying that Trump hurt the party. Baker said he left his presidential ballots blank in 2016 and 2020.
Baker was more popular in his home state among Democrats and independents, and Jim Lyons, the chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, suggested Baker chose not to run again because he was “shaken” by Trump’s endorsement of Geoff Diehl as the Republican nominee. Baker denied that was the case, and Maura Healey, a Democrat, handily defeated Diehl in November.
“I can state unequivocally that this was nowhere near my mind when I made the decision a year ago not to seek re-election,” Baker said Thursday.
Baker’s appointment marks the latest turn in the evolution of the N.C.A.A.
The first executive director of the N.C.A.A., Walter Byers, lorded over the organization for 38 years. He came to the job from a meager position: an assistant sports information director for the Big Ten.
He was succeeded by a series of career college sports administrators, often athletic directors, until 2002. Then, Myles Brand, a former president at Indiana University — where he had gained notoriety for firing the tempestuous but famed basketball coach Bob Knight — was hired at a time of rising tensions between academics and the increasingly big business of college sports.
The position under Brand morphed into the one now that functions more like a czar, driving policy decisions that are sometimes political — like pulling championship events from campuses whose mascots were deemed offensive to Native Americans — and dealing with the ambitions of the major conferences, which have increasingly wrested power from the N.C.A.A.
After Brand died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, his replacement was another university president. But while Emmert had polished his political skills in the world of academia, he was also immersed in college sports, having been the chancellor at Louisiana State, where he hired an up-and-coming football coach, Nick Saban, and the president of the University of Washington.
An early attempt to consolidate power backfired when the N.C.A.A. was forced to roll back severe penalties against Penn State, which included a $60 million fine, in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal involving the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
As Emmert leaves, forced out more than two years before his contract was set to expire, the job of president has become more like that of a well-compensated politician: a figurehead who becomes a public punching bag and who is being increasingly called upon to cajole Congress for help and to defend the N.C.A.A.’s business model in the courts.
Emmert took hits for everything from a failure to establish endorsement guidelines for college athletes to a unanimous Supreme Court opinion that excoriated what it called an exploitative system to allowing gender inequities between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to fester.
With the public scrutiny and the immense business challenges, being N.C.A.A. president, while high-paying, seems like it would be unappealing for a person like Baker, who has worked in government for almost all of his professional life.
“I certainly think the challenges here are significant,” Baker said, adding: “I think from my point of view, it’s important that a lot of these issues get dealt with and get dealt with in a way that works.”
And those challenges are plentiful, from the N.C.A.A.’s transfer portal to players cashing in on their fame. A day before Baker’s appointment, the University of California Board of Regents approved a move by U.C.L.A. to the Big Ten from the Pac-12, which will double U.C.L.A.’s television contract to $60 million to $70 million per year. (The move was highly contentious within the U.C.L.A. community, but clearly driven by financial considerations for the struggling athletic department.)
Baker chose not to comment Thursday on the list of challenges he will face, saying he still had his job as governor to focus on for now.
“The big worry I have, which I’m sure is the worry a lot of people have when it comes to college sports, is if we can’t figure out a way to organize and frame the future of college sports, we’re going to lose a tremendous opportunity to provide a real opportunity to literally hundreds of thousands of kids going forward,” he said.
He added: “It’s big and complicated. So have been a lot of things I’ve done in my life, but most of the time, they were absolutely worth doing.”
Billy Witz contributed reporting.
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