Extended Interview: NCAA President Charlie Baker

0:00Charlie Baker, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. You know, college athletics has changed dramatically in just a few years with athletes now able to earn money and schools directly sharing revenue. Earlier this year, you said the NCAA is in the middle of its biggest transformation in decades. What did you mean by that? Well, if you think about the 100 years plus of the NCAA, the three biggest things that have happened in my view were the creation of it almost a little over 100 years ago. The Title IX, which completely changed the playing field with respect to women's sports, and this, which was the first time you could have actual revenue sharing beyond sort of scholarship support and other kinds of academic support and that sort of thing for student athletes.

0:46And I say to people all the time that you can't go through a change that's this big and not expect a lot of bumps along the way. And we certainly have plenty of those. But as the first person who actually made a proposal around school-based revenue sharing shortly after I got this job back in 2023, I think it's a good thing. Is it messy? Yes. Could it have been less messy? Maybe. But when you go through something like this on this kind of scale, where you're talking about a billion dollars potentially going out to student athletes every year, it's going to be challenging. And as a result, it has been.

1:23Now, sports and particularly college sports, as you've mentioned, you're becoming so lucrative and the subject of such great controversy and conversation that Congress has now stepped in, as you know. You're supportive of the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act because it establishes national standards on the name, image and likeness program for student athletes because it limits player transfers and makes other changes that are designed to be equitable, at least in the legislation across college athletics. But, you know, several of the largest athletic conferences take issue with this legislation.

1:59So as Washington continues debating it, why do you think it's necessary? Why do you think it's worth passing? Well, first of all, I want to say how much I appreciate the work that Senators Cantwell and Cruz and their colleagues have done on this. You can tell just by looking at the legislation where they both gave up big things that mattered to them in pursuit of something that was a bill that could be supported by both sides. In this day and age, honestly, having spent a bunch of my career in public life, I know how hard that is to do, and I appreciate it. But if you were to say to me, is the eligibility system that we currently have working?

2:35I mean, if everybody would comply with it and stay out of the courts, maybe, but they don't, there is no agent regulation, which is a huge problem. You talk to any student athlete about that and any school about it, they'll tell you that. This provides some regulatory structure around agents. It also deals with all the state preemption issues. You know, you've got 40 different states with 40 different rules around how NIL should work, which makes it virtually impossible to set a national standard. You also have the elements associated with dealing with how we're going to handle some of the issues around NIL, which you mentioned.

3:08And again, for all of this, what we're really trying to achieve is some sort of national framework so that you can have national championships and national competitions in which, for all intents and purposes, everybody's playing by the same set of rules. Now, I understand some of the concerns that the Big Ten and the SEC in particular have raised with the bill. We have some concerns with the bill, too. But to simply walk away from something that deals with a number of the most significant challenges that face college sports at that point in time, in my view, would be a mistake. And I spent time talking to folks in all of the power conferences and the rest of Division I and Division II and Division III about this.

3:49And my message to them has been, look, these folks crafted a bipartisan bill. Really hard to do. Does everybody love everything about it? No. Is the process associated with crafting it done? Also no. So let's take seriously this opportunity to support the process, support the effort, support the parts of the bill that we believe in, and then continue to try and work with folks in the Senate and hopefully ultimately folks in the House to create something that we can all get behind. You know, there are a host of issues we could dive into regarding this. I guess I want to start with the fact that, you know, by allowing the NIL and allowing schools to directly share revenue, you are seeing different Division I programs in other sports other than football and basketball, which are the biggest, get cut.

4:40Things like volleyball, track and field, a lot of the Olympic sports, and there's been a lot of concern about that. What does this legislation do? What's the NCAA doing to ensure that while all the money is going into football, basketball, lacrosse, maybe to some extent, volleyball, women's volleyball to some extent, but all those other sports, what are you going to protect those and ensure that athletes who want to participate in those will still be able to do so? Well, first of all, the idea that sports are being cut only tells half the story. Because at the same time certain sports may be being cut, other sports are being introduced.

5:17If you look at the number of kids who are playing sports right now in Division I, and you look at the number that are playing in Division II and Division III, they're basically at pretty close to all-time highs. And there are certainly more kids playing in college sports now than there were when I got this job three years ago. No one ever writes about or talks about or promotes the sports that get added. They only talk about, which I understand, having come out of politics myself, about the sports that get cut. And I think one of the things we can do and have done by dealing with all the issues that were associated with this issue around revenue sharing, which again, I supported soon after I got the job, I think we've created a mechanism that limits a lot of what would have been future potential risk that was far more dramatic than actually solving this problem, creating a process and a structure and moving forward.

6:11I also think the investments that the schools are making in many of the Olympic sports are real. And I visited a bunch of those campuses, and I've talked to a lot of the schools that are some of the biggest players in the Olympic sports movement. And they believe those are huge parts of their brand. It's huge parts of how they excite their alumni. It's huge parts of how they create community on campus. And by the way, it's also a huge part of how we do well in the Olympics. I mean, our Olympians Made Here program, which we ran in conjunction with the networks that sponsored and supported the 2024 Winter and Summer Olympics, were unbelievable in terms of the visibility and the attention they brought to the role that schools play in Olympic sports.

6:56Should we pay attention to this? Yes, we track all this stuff every quarter with respect to ads and subtracts with regard to sports that are being made available and sports that are being reduced. But I think the idea that somehow there's a crisis here, I don't buy it, first of all. And secondly, I think the legislation does deal with this in a variety of ways. I happen to think there are better ways to deal with it, and it's an important issue, and we're going to continue to talk to folks in the Senate about that. But I think this notion that somehow paying or providing revenue sharing to kids in high-revenue sports, of which, frankly, there's really only two, football and some basketball programs, people need to remember that football and men's basketball, for the most part, supports all the other programs that schools make available, especially in Division I.

7:49And that is not an insignificant issue when you think about this. I believe that at the end of the day, the best way to deal with it is treat the sports that generate significant amounts of revenue appropriately, right? And make sure there is this opportunity to share revenue. And then track and pay attention to what's going on everywhere else. I'd also point out we've raised$300 million in new revenue since I got this job. And a big piece of it has gone to pay off some of the legal settlements that I inherited when I got the job, which means schools don't have to pay those, which is a good thing.

8:24Right. Let's work through some some other things. In recent days, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to let states determine whether or not to allow transgender athletes to participate in sports. Last year, the NCAA changed its policy to align with the president's executive order threatening to revoke federal funding for schools that permitted transgender athletes. the NCAA changed its policy in part, saying it provides a clear national standard. In light of the high court's ruling, do you foresee the NCAA having to tweak its transgender athletes policy? I don't think so. I mean, generally speaking, we try to establish policies from most of our programs that can hopefully have a national standard to it.

9:05I had said to folks, Democrats and Republicans in Washington after I got this job that we needed some sort of clarity around what the national standard for this would be. And we adopted and comply with the standard that was put forth by the Trump administration. I think what happens at the state level is a different question. Although I do think our national standard is going to be what we expect our schools to use with respect to eligibility issues for college sports. But obviously, these different states will have different standards about how to deal with high school and youth sports. You know that this has become a popular political and campaign issue, especially in Washington or on the campaign trail.

9:43But you told Congress in late 2024 that of the 500 ,000 student athletes attending NCAA schools, fewer than 10 were openly transgender. Where does this issue rank in terms of the critical ones facing the NCAA? Well, from my point of view, the most important thing about it is to have a clear policy and to have one that's consistent with federal policy, because that eliminates sort of all the gray with respect to how this should be dealt with or how it should be treated. But I can tell you that having talked to people on both sides of this issue, to those who are involved in it, it matters a lot.

10:19And I'm glad that the federal government gave us something we've been seeking for several years, which was a clear standard with respect to how to apply this. Inclusivity is one of the main priorities of the NCAA. Do you think this policy makes the NCAA inclusive enough? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think the public, there's plenty of science and plenty of debate and discussion about this, and reasonable people can disagree. But I don't believe that this change at the federal level, which did create clarity for us around this issue, steps us back at all from our policies with respect to inclusivity and participation.

10:56You know, if you're a transgender woman who is assigned birth as male at birth, you can participate in what we call the open network, which means playing basically in men's sports. And I don't have a problem with the way that policy currently operates. And frankly, I don't think many of our schools do either. We've seen conference realignment in recent years really reshaped the map of college football especially. You got teams in the east now playing, teams in the west they would have never played before. You got teams in the southeast traveling all the way to California for games. Do you get a sense whether we're nearing the end of realignment or not?

11:39You know, the real question there is, you know, when does everybody's TV contracts come up? And what will that mean with respect to how they get negotiated at that point in time because everybody's obviously living with the terms and conditions associated with those. I will say this, that most of the conversation I've heard among schools, at least at the Division One level, is whether they should try and figure out some way to create a more regional approach to sports other than football, right? Because football is, depending upon the conference and the league and the program, somewhere between 11 and 14 games in a season.

12:15Whereas you have many other sports, men's and women's sports, where you play literally 30, 40, 50, 60 games. And I think the conversation that people have started to have is whether or not there's a way to think a little differently about how to schedule the football stuff than the way you schedule some of these other sports. Because in some of the other, you know, football's once a week, right? And it's usually over a weekend. A lot of these other sports, you're playing midweek, you're playing And over the weekends, in those sports, the travel question becomes, I think, a much bigger challenge and a bigger issue than it is.

12:50Are you suggesting in some kind of college football league separate from all the other athletics? No, I'm saying that schools and conferences have just started to have conversations about whether or not there should be some thought put into whether or not it makes sense to think a little differently about how to handle some of the sports that have huge numbers of games. games relative to some of the sports that have a much fewer number. That's a really embryonic conversation, but I think it's a good one for people to have. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of people who look at this and think, you know, I went to this university.

13:26It can't compete with some of these bigger ones. Are we essentially in an era now where only the biggest brands in the deepest pockets in college sports can expect to win basketball and football championships?

13:42Well, I think football is a little different than some of the other sports. I think in football, given the scale of what it takes to create a competitive program, which was true even before the NIL era, that's probably a reasonable assumption. I think in most other sports, there's still plenty of room for competition. I mean, if you look at baseball, for example, Troy in Alabama made it to the College World Series. If you look at ice hockey, Denver won the national championship. I mean, I can go, there are plenty of sports where there's still a lot of competition. What's particularly interesting, I think, on the women's side is the scale and significance of how much success the major programs and the power conference schools have had in growing and winning in women's sports.

14:36The investments that they've made there have made an enormous difference in their ability to out-compete just about everybody else. I think on the guys' side, there's still a bunch of sports that are still very much competitive, sort of up and down. Right. You know, as we talk about— Look, I mean, the last two national champions in men's lacrosse were Cornell and Princeton. So, I mean, look, there's a lot of prognosis. You and I started this conversation about how much change is going on in college sports as a result of our commitment to try to figure out a way to create revenue sharing for student athletes.

15:17There's all kinds of things that are going to play out over the course of the next few years. And while we're in the middle of this, a lot of people are going to allege and claim and predict a lot of things. My guess is some of them will be right and many of them won't be. Well, let me ask you about one in particular. There are leaders at the Southeastern Conference, for example. I'm thinking of the head coach and the president of the University of Georgia, who've talked openly about the SEC breaking away from the NCAA if this legislation that's being considered isn't considered favorable to the conference.

15:47And once the TV contracts come up, why don't they just go their own separate way? What would you say to those in the SEC or other leagues that say or conferences that say, yeah, let's just go out on our own? Well, they'll have a hard time running national championships if they do that, because everybody won't have the same rules. I actually like and respect a lot of the people at Georgia in particular and at Ole Miss and at LSU and a whole bunch of those schools who I deal with on a pretty regular basis. I think the possibility of trying to figure out some way to determine what really has to be a national standard to have national championships and what you probably could do at a conference level, because it doesn't necessarily affect our ability to run national championships on a level playing field, could be one way to think about it.

16:42There could be places or circumstances where maybe you have a national rule, but you have the enforcement activity actually take place at the conference level. I mean, we've done a lot of things to streamline and change the way the NCAA has governed since I got there. I mean, we got rid of about 80 committees. We had a lot of committees that have 50 people on them. They now have about 20. We added a lot more student athletes to our committees, all about trying to create a process that can move more quickly. And if you look at how fast we got the eligibility changes in place, that was an idea in December.

17:14And now it's currently NCA policy with respect to how eligibility in Division I works. I think there's plenty of room here to come up with strategies and approaches that can work and can actually serve the membership in some respects in a better way than we have in the past. Because there are significant differences at this point between and among a lot of these schools. As we talk about money and sports, of course, betting has become a much bigger concern and obsession, really, for a lot of fans. And there's growing concern about student athletes and betting. What can the NCAA do to ensure that student athletes aren't betting on these games?

17:55Well, first of all, we run the largest integrity program in the world. And we catch, unfortunately, a lot of young people betting on sports, which is always a shame. We also run a very significant on-campus education program, which many schools and many student-athletes, literally hundreds of thousands, have taken advantage of. We also were the first to really raise the alarm about prop bets. I started talking about that pretty much as soon as I got the job in the spring of 23, because I heard about it a lot from student-athletes, who said the noise and the abuse that they were taking from bettors around prop bets was really disturbing.

18:41And I think we're the only league that runs a surveillance program at all of our major championships where we track all the traffic on social media and notify the authorities about the stuff we think is particularly bad when it comes to coaches, players, or officials to get those people X'd off the platforms for the rest of the tournament. And in many cases have had to notify local authorities about particularly aggressive abuse that's been directed at student-athletes. I also think this is one where I've been really pleased to see the pro leagues start to step up and say this prop betting stuff is bad news.

19:18It's bad news for our players. It's bad news for their families. and my hope is that we working together with our colleagues in the professional leagues can dramatically limit, significantly reduce, and in my mind, at least at the collegiate level, get rid of all of the negative prop bets and hopefully most of the prop bets. Because that's where, I mean, kids get, if you're a student athlete on campus in a major program, the likelihood that you have classmates and friends and family members and friends of family members all over you about prop bets on a pretty regular basis, asking you, you know, don't take the first pitch, don't take the first shot, don't catch the first pass.

19:58I don't want you to lose the game, but here's all the other things I want you to do so that I can make money. Honestly, it's disgraceful, it's demeaning, and it's incredibly demoralizing for student athletes. And I think we're starting to win this discussion and this debate with the public, and I'm anxious to have a lot of the folks who are part of our community get deeply involved and organized on this one. You'll appreciate that on this show there are people who may not know what a prop bet is, but it's the idea that you're betting on something specific or that a player or a team will do something over the course of the game, right?

20:35That's generally what a prop bet would be, right? I mean, a prop bet could literally be, will the team score more than 50 points in the first half? well, you score more than 15 points in a basketball game. But literally the parlays around this, which are usually three or four bets, which are some of the most attractive betting scenarios that a lot of young people especially use in these online sports books, that stuff in particular is an enormous piece of betting generally. And it totally changes the character and the culture of fandom. I mean, if you go sometime just for fun, go sit on the go sit on the stands behind the bench at a big time college basketball game and just listen to some of this stuff that's being directed at the kids who are part of those teams.

21:28Yeah. And I've heard it and seen it at the pro level, too. It's incredible. Right to their face. at times. Look, in our remaining moments, we heard from a high school athlete this week who wanted to know what kind of advice you'd give to young athletes who aspire to succeed in college sports. I think the biggest thing I'd say is be a great teammate, all right? Number one, you know, the teams that succeed have great cultures. They always do. Be a great teammate. I'm a father of kids who played multiple sports. They all chose one when they got to college. But I think when you're young, you should play a lot of different sports.

22:09The skill sets and the capabilities and the learnings that will come from that will benefit you. Figure out what it is you think you really love and can be good at and are willing to put the time and the energy into getting great at. And find yourself a couple of coaches who you really believe have your best interests at heart and are going to help you figure out the best way to be your best self, not just as a player, but as a person. Because in the end of the day, it's, you know, the being a great person part is a huge part of what it means to be a great athlete and a great teammate and a great adult, too.

22:44And looking ahead five years, what gives you the most optimism about college sports, especially as you tackle all these other heady issues, especially around the money of college sports? Yeah. Well, the first thing is, you know, when I got to the NCAA, people said we'd never solve the issue around revenue sharing, which we did. So I tend to not pay. I listen to the doomsayers. And if they say something particularly interesting that I think is well thought out and reasonable, I'll take it into the, you know, sort of consideration as we think about the future. But to me, the thing that gives me the most hope about the future is I probably meet with over 1 ,000 student-athletes a year across all three divisions and a whole variety of men and women sports.

23:27They are some of the best people, best kids I've ever been around. And they, I've said to many people, they make me feel much better about the future of college sports and the future of our country than just about anything else. Well, Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA, former governor of Massachusetts, thank you for spending some time with us. And as the debate over college sports continues, hopefully we can talk again. Look forward to it. Have a nice weekend, Ed, and happy 250th. You too. Take care. And we'll be right back. Criminal Minds Evolution is back on Paramount+. We are going to go where the evidence takes us.

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