NCAA Hiring Charlie Baker As Next President Is Likely More Symbolic Than Meaningful

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, a trade association in crisis, pulled a page out of the 1921 Major League Baseball handbook today when it announced that it has named Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker as the association’s next president, effective in March 2023. Baker’s appointment is unlikely to change the NCAA’s internal positions on important matters such as the right for college athlete pay, but it may allow the association to showcase a better face, moving forward, when lobbying Congress or talking to the media.

To be clear, the president of the NCAA does not have nearly the internal power that one would think. As a bottom-up trade association composed of more than 1,200 members, primary NCAA decision-making is made by vote of either association members overall or a governance subcommittee of members. The NCAA president thus plays more of an executive role, whereas membership and their subcommittees are the legislature.

However, in selecting Baker—a relatively well-liked and moderate politician—the NCAA can perhaps present a better front to legislators and the media, as the association continues to plead with legislatures to grant it an antitrust exemption to limit or prevent college-athlete compensation—an exemption that thus far Congress has rightly denied the NCAA.

While turning to a soon-to-be former government official in Baker to serve as NCAA president is a first for the monopolist college sports trade association, this is not an altogether new strategy for sports leagues in crisis. Indeed, back in January of 1921, when Major League Baseball was fearing a substantial increase in government scrutiny in the aftermath of the league’s major game-fixing scandal during the 1919 World Series, Albert Lasker, then a minority owner of the Chicago Cubs, convinced the other Major League Baseball owners to bring in a strong commissioner with a strong public face to give the perception that the sport had government-like self-regulation.

Lasker’s first choice was former U.S. President William Howard Taft. However, after Taft learned that he was a likely candidate for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, he declined—leaving the league-owners scrambling and ultimately selecting federal judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis instead.

In the case of Major League Baseball’s turn to a former government official as a way to try to keep government away from regulating the sport, the league was largely successful. Under Landis, the U.S. government stayed at arms’ length from the business of baseball, and team franchise values skyrocketed.

In terms of his record on reform while leading Major League Baseball, however, Landis’s results were far less positive. Outside of one specific and usual circumstance, Landis stringently enforced the league’s reserve rule that tied players to a single team and strongly deflated their salaries. And, Landis was a major figure in keeping in place Major League Baseball’s unofficial rules disallowing teams from signing Black baseball players.

For the good of sports and the wellbeing of college athletes, let’s hope Charlie Baker is able to garner more support within NCAA members for earnest and good-faith reform than Landis was ever able to achieve in Major League Baseball. Nonetheless, the way the NCAA is presently structured, Baker will have an uphill battle, working with a voting membership that may like his appointment, but also seems to like maintaining the status quo.

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Marc Edelman ([email protected]) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, Sports Ethics Director of the Robert Zicklin Center on Corporate Integrity, and the founder of Edelman Law. He is the author of “Reimagining the Governance of College Sports After Alston.”