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Between last week and this, conference media days across the country are announcing the arrival of a new college football season.
COVID-19 has not allowed a complete return to normal. The SEC isn’t reaching fans for its media days, given the long tradition, while the Big Ten on Friday handed out a seven-point list of minutes and recommendations to attendees of its two-day event later this week. But for 18 months after a complete anomaly, the return of these annual start dates is the surest sign, but college sports are returning to normal service.
However, the surrounding landscape has rarely felt less familiar.
Not just because of COVID-19, but certainly accelerating the critical mass of problems faced during and as a result of the pandemic, college sports have become as significant a flow as any of their current history.
Much of this change is necessary regardless of the resulting growth pains. Some of it is long overdue.
NCAA President Mark Emmert told last week to a small number of journalists, including US TODAYs Dan Wolken, that it might be time to re-imagine the role of associations in university athletics.
I think we need to reconsider delegating many of the things that are now being done at the national level, Emmert said, according to Wolken. It should only be at that level if it is the only place it can do it, if it is the only place where it makes sense to develop and implement a rule.
Emmerts ’comments, which had led the NCAA during his second decade, represented a remarkable mindset from the association’s leader, who for decades has established and maintained a largely top-down power structure at the highest level of American college sports. In a word, when we say college athletics, we usually mean the NCAA in the same way as the NFL for professional football or the NBA for professional basketball.
But that power structure has spent the last 10 to 15 years surviving its share of the problems.
The NCAA was not excited about reorganizing the conference or forming their collective movement toward autonomy in what we now call the Power Five conferences: ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-12. Those things happened anyway.
More importantly, the challenges of amateur skills are among the core themes and dominant perspectives that govern NCAA’s philosophy. Everything from the pay, name, image, and similarity of the game to athletes ’alliances and collective bargaining has forced the association to defend both its rules and principles on many fronts.
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Those challenges are starting to break the wall now. The Supreme Court ruling in the Alston case, a unanimous decision by a panel of judges philosophically about everything else, dealt with attacks on the amateur body at a time when state law forced the NCAA to adopt the NIL, which the NCAA had once strongly opposed.
The NIL was probably not the only catalyst for Emmerts ’comments last week or the apparent change in associations in the distribution of power through the university’s athletics pyramid, but the dam may crumble.
In any case, NIL points to the complexity associated with the broader question of who should be responsible for what in university athletics.
It is likely to be much more relevant for larger schools than for smaller schools. It presents a litany of enforcement challenges to a governing body that may be shy of this action right now, fearing exposing the association to new competition law challenges. And unless its practice is governed by federal law, it will continue to exist through state laws, the governors ’executive, and individual schools’ own policies, creating an uneven, volatile ecosystem in which one of the most dramatic changes to the NCAA will evolve and mature in the years to come.
In short, the NIL is a nice symbol of the multi-layered challenge that the NCAA now faces: It is too broad and too complex to be reasonably managed by a one-size-fits-all system.
So, here we are.
No one should be surprised. The push of Power Fives adjustments and the movement of autonomy never felt like endpoints. The challenges of amateurism were becoming too much and too detailed to fail forever. Sports Illustrateds Ross Dellenger said on Monday a group of numerous conference commissioners whose power in university athletics should never be underestimated were ready to demand changes to the university’s sports governance structure before Emmert predicted them last week.
Emmert itself has become a flash of criticism in recent years.
Some of them, such as the deplorable differences in the facilities between the men’s and women’s bubbling men’s basketball tournaments held in March, have been fully justified. But part of it can be seen, frankly, only as part of the work.
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The president of the NCAA is a great authority, but it is always important to remember that the association exists and operates at the request of its member schools. Emmert leads the NCAA, but he never acts unilaterally. The board of directors of the associations is its final governing body, and although Emmert sits on that 25-member board, his position is non-voting unless he has to do so in order to separate the tie.
Emmert is a powerful figure in college sports, but he is not a king. He works for the benefit of his membership. It should only reinforce the significance of what he said when he says, as he did to Wolken and others last week, that this is a real auspicious moment to relax and look at many key assumptions and say: If we were going to rebuild college sport in 2020 instead of 1920, would look like?
Will the NCAA ever really disappear? Unlikely. It has too much branding, it can still serve a variety of bureaucratic and organizational purposes, and as these recent months have shown, it is helpful that an association exists when college sports need someone or something to criticize the cannon. .
But its role is evolving, probably to the extent that college sports, as we know them today, will look dramatically different very soon.
What would we change, Emmert continued, what are we waiting for or what is the way we manage it? This is the right time.
We can discuss whether this is the right moment for such a fundamental change, but it is almost certainly a phenomenon. Change is coming to university sports. In many ways, it feels long overdue.
Follow IndyStar editor Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
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