Inside the NCAA’s Moneyball Era

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1:04Congratulations, you made the varsity, the podcast. My name is Jon O 'Ran, and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, Charlie Baker joins us. Charlie, of course, is a former Massachusetts governor who has run the NCAA for almost three years now. It seems like there's so much chaos in college sports these days. There is so much chaos in college sports, he says, so I'm eager to listen to Charlie Baker tell us what's working, what's not working, and how things are going to change. But before we get to Charlie Baker, today is Sunday, January 11th, and here's what I'm watching.

1:44NASCAR. Now, I was hardly surprised on Tuesday when I learned that Steve Phelps had stepped down as NASCAR's first ever commissioner. I felt bad for Phelps. He was a former guest on this pod, of course. He was the victim of a discovery proceeding during a NASCAR trial that really should have been settled months ago, months earlier than that. The Michael Jordan trial. Several of Phelps' indiscreet texts were read in open court, including one that referred to longtime team owner Richard Childress as a stupid redneck. It became obvious that Phelps' days at NASCAR were numbered from that moment on.

2:24Anyway, NASCAR ended up settling the suit. Again, they should have settled it about a year earlier. Steve Phelps was pushed out, and now the rumors start. Could NASCAR be for sale? It's privately owned, having been run by the France family since its start in 1948. But some media companies and private equity players have had informal talks about what it would look like to take a minority stake in the racing series. Some have wondered if the France family could be looking for strategic partners. Think about this, real estate companies that could possibly develop around the circuit's tracks. Rather than actually taking an equity stake in the business, that's something that's been out there.

3:07Others believe, though they certainly hope, that this could be the first step toward an outright sale. Now remember, NBC came close to buying it eight years ago before NBC's parent, Comcast, decided to buy Sky instead. So who could be interested? Well, their group likes Liberty. They own 4101. Or TKO, which owns UFC, WWE, PBR. There's also private equity firms, a ton of them out there. Companies like Ares, Arctos, Sixth Street. or there are media and streaming companies that want to own more content. Think ESPN, Amazon. They already have a deal with NASCAR. Anyway, nothing is imminent, but these rumors are active, and it's something that I'm certainly going to be watching over the next several months.

3:56As for now, let's get to Charlie Baker. Charlie Baker, NCAA president. I had my crack research staff look up. be played. Everybody, every time anybody writes about you, they talk about Harvard basketball. And I did an AI overview of your career at Harvard basketball. And they described you as a defensive-minded forward known for his grit, which I think puts you in a perfect stead to lead the NCAA, somebody that's known for his grit. So I think the first question that I have for you is So just from a 50 ,000-foot level, give me an overview. What's the state of college sports right now? Well, you've got to think about it in a variety of ways.

4:48I mean, there's 550 ,000 kids playing college sports at 1 ,100 schools, 95 % of which don't spend a lot of time on TV and don't get a lot of headlines. And then there's the 5 % that represent the sort of most well-known sports, which are men's and women's basketball, football, maybe a little bit of baseball and softball at what I think of as sort of the so-called power schools. And those, you know, frankly, those are very different. And it bothers me sometimes when people make statements about college sports and what they're really talking about is big time college football, where they make statements about college sports that are related to some other particular element of it and call that college sports.

5:41I mean, the state of college sports overall, I think, is actually pretty good. I mean, if you look at when I joined the NCAA, there were about 510 ,000 kids playing college sports. Now there's 556 ,000 kids playing college sports. Women's sports have grown dramatically over the course of the past 10 years and especially over the course of the past five years. Women's volleyball championship for viewership attendance sort of broke every record we had. the FCS football championship, which is the second tier of division one or the other tier in division one, just had its largest attendance, I think, since the.

6:25Oh, God, at least the last 10 years. And we played it in Nashville at Vanderbilt Stadium, which was awesome. And the game was incredible. There's a lot going on in college sports beyond the stuff that everybody talks about, which is primarily about football and men's basketball and women's basketball. And the wrestling championship was huge this year. And college wrestling generally is doing really well. And we're going to, for the first time, have a women's wrestling championship this year. That's a new NCAA sport with the championship. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on and what I would describe as the top tier.

7:06But there's also a lot of stuff going on off the top tier that I think is just as important. As one of the people who actually played in the rest of college sports, and my kids played D3 football in the rest of college sports, I take the whole thing pretty seriously. And I'm known for having attended more D2, D3, and non-big-time championships than any president ever at the NCAA. I go to a bunch of the big time ones too, but I like the whole show. So before we start talking about the upper tier, the sports that everybody's talking about, the professionalization of college football, college basketball, both men's and women's, what's a knock-on effect of that down to the sports that you were just talking about?

7:59I think there's two big pieces to it. And, you know, you can sort of draw your own conclusions about whether that's good or bad. I mean, one of them is certainly that the opportunity for kids who start at one level, who turn out to be really exceptional players, to be able to get to play at a higher level is a lot different than it was, say, five or ten years ago. So take Cam Ward, who won the Heisman Trophy two years ago, not last year, but two years ago, or this past year. he started at Immaculate Word in Texas and then played, I think, two years at Washington State and then finished his career at Miami and won a Heisman Trophy and became the number one draft pick.

8:46That wouldn't have happened a decade ago. Might not have even happened seven or eight years ago. If you look at most of the kids who were part of the finalists in the Heisman for the last two years. Most of them, Ashton Jenty might be the only one I can think of that started and finished at the same school. And people can debate all day long whether they think that's a good or a bad thing. And there's lots of arguments to be had on both sides of that. But I think the opportunity that kids have to transfer, I would argue that, you know, we had what I think was a reasonable transfer rule, which we lost in a court case in West Virginia, which is the other thing I would point out to you.

9:31The amount of litigation in big time college sports is amazing. And I'll leave it at that. Some of that movement that people talk about is actually not a bad thing. And I, you know, I constantly run into kids who I saw at one school who I walked away saying that was a really good kid and, you know, terrific player. And then I bump into them the next year at a different school. And my question to them is always, you know, why did you, why did you transfer? Well, I, you know, I completed all my credits and I had one more year and, and, and there was a graduate program they had that was interesting to me.

10:11So I transferred and, and, and took advantage of that. And, you know, the transferring every year piece, which is what was handed to us by the court decision in West Virginia, I think everybody worries about that one in terms of both personal development, you know, academic performance, and maybe in some cases, even opportunity to grow within a program, which is still a really good thing for a lot of young people. But the mere fact that, you know, There is opportunity for student athletes to move, particularly if the coach has basically said to them, you're not really going to be part of our plans for next year.

10:52I don't know how anybody can argue with that. I think the challenge here is sort of figuring out what the right balance is. What's an ideal transfer rule for you? Forget about the court cases. What's a rule that you would hope gets in place to solve what really is a problem for a lot of fans right now, I think? Yeah, well, everybody should be allowed to transfer once at least, right? I think you should be allowed to transfer again if there's demonstrated some sort of exigent circumstance. The coach moves. If the coach moves, kids should be allowed to move, period. End of discussion. and I think the most important thing we got to do and then I think after that it has to be really special circumstances and I think we got to pay a lot of attention to how they're doing academically because even at that top level we're talking about here John you know percent aren't playing professionally and the opportunity to get the degree is really going to matter now in division one one of the rules we instituted a couple years ago which everybody's obeying and following, which is great, is you get 10 years to keep your scholarship once you get it, whether you play or not.

12:06And that's to give you time to get your degree if it turns out that you weren't able to get it in the window in which you were competing athletically. But I think the right transfer rule is, you know, once, no questions asked, can't be in the same season, obviously. Second time, if there are some set of circumstances that would support that, and I think obviously being told you're not part of the next couple of years at our program would be one of those things. But after that, I really, kids need, I do believe they need some stability here. And I think a lot of the kids I've talked to have said that.

12:45It's funny, the ones that get left behind when there's all this transferring, you know, they speak to the fact that it's hard to create culture and it's hard to, it's hard to sort of count on, um, sort of what your team's going to look like and how it's going to work from one year to the next. Um, but then on top of that, you got a lot of the adults moving around too. And, um, and if the adults are moving, last year in the tournament, um, basketball tournament, the sweet 16, there were three teams where at least three of their players were, um, who were starting for them started at their school, right?

13:24You'll be surprised to hear that it was Houston, where Calvin Sampson has been the coach for a million years, Michigan State, where Tom Izzo has been the coach for a million years, and Purdue, where Matt Painter has been the coach for a million years. You know, what the adults do does have some impact on what the kids do, and we shouldn't ignore that. Yeah, you're speaking to a Maryland Terrapin alum who this year has, there's 15 new players that are there and an entirely new coaching staff as well, which is, it's hard to build a fan base with a lot of half-empty crowds watching that game. But your answer sort of gets into some of the eligibility questions.

14:10And of course, like there've been a billion headlines about James Nagy, Baylor signed him. He's from Nigeria. He was drafted, I believe, by the Pistons. And the people that have stuck around, I think Izzo spoke about a Calipari, spoke about a Mark Few out of Gonzaga, sort of about the problems inherent with that. Walk me through the way that you view something like that. Well, keep in mind that he got drafted, but he actually never played or signed. He never played in the NBA and he never signed an NBA contract. And that doesn't make him much different or doesn't make him much different than a lot of kids.

14:56The rule for, there's nothing new about our rule here. Okay. And there have been several folks in the media who are sort of part of what I would describe as the basketball experts who have written about the fact that the NCAA's rules around eligibility when it comes to basketball haven't changed very much. What changed was the incentives. Once upon a time, there really wasn't a reason for somebody to enter as a first-year basketball student athlete after trying to get to see if they could get drafted or play in the G League or was a European kid who was playing on a club team over there. But now there is a reason for student-athletes to do that, and in part it's related to the financial benefits that come with doing that under the house injunction.

15:56But his story, which generated so much attention, is not that much different than the stories of a number of other student-athletes who got drafted, didn't sign a contract, didn't play for the professional team, didn't do any of those things, or somebody who went straight out of high school into the G League, never signed a two-year contract, never sat on a bench or signed an NBA contract, or somebody who played for a club team in some other country who then came and played in the U.S. And, you know, we put out a statement when all this was out basically saying we have not changed our rules. They're the same rules we've always had.

16:41We tipped the scales a little bit to give kids who play domestically at the G League level, you know, an opportunity to play collegiate basketball so that they would be on the same level as some of the kids who do this coming out of the club leagues and other parts of the world. But even though he was drafted, he never, I mean, he didn't play professionally. He didn't play in the NBA. He didn't sign an NBA deal. So let me ask you a similar question that I asked. What's ideal for you in terms of eligibility rules? If you play professionally in the G League, should you be allowed to come in? If you play professionally in Europe or in Africa or another country?

17:25What if you had total power over dictating? Because we all know the courts and Congress. I think what I would say is, I think if you play a season in the G League, okay, just in the G League, that's a season of competition. So if you were to choose at that point to choose to enroll in college, you would have lost one season of competition. and in a perfect world, you'd have four seasons of competition to be played in a five-year period. And the reason for the five-year period would be, you know, you get injured, you have an academic problem, somebody in your family dies, whatever it might be. But beyond that, my view is, you know, if you're not playing in the NBA and you're not signing an NBA contract, you should be able to enter, those seasons would count as seasons of competition.

18:25But if you played two seasons in the G League or two seasons for club, whatever, and you wanted to come to college, you could come, but you would have two seasons of competition and three seasons to play. Right. So basically, four total seasons, like you can be in something Calipari was going off on, you can be in school for five years and play four seasons. Right. He's exactly right. That was the rule, okay? And that is the rule. And I'll give you an example of how this gets sort of manipulated. There were 1 ,400 plus or minus requests for waivers for somebody looking for a fifth year, okay? Not a fifth year of eligibility, but a fifth season of, fifth year of competition, right?

19:19two-thirds of those got approved. So that leaves about 450 that got denied. Of the 450 that got denied, I think 35 ended up challenging that denial in court. And we've won about 75 % of those cases. So now you're down to sort of a handful of cases that we didn't win that represent all of the noise and all of the uncertainty that makes people nuts about the current state of college sports. Now, if the schools, those kids are in court because the school is sponsoring their opportunity to continue to play, period. And the problem with having the situation we have now is 90 % plus of the schools abide by the rules, the five years to play for it.

20:12And if somebody doesn't get a waiver, that's that. But a small number of them go to court and seek another season. And it leads to coaches calling me up and athletic directors calling me up and saying, look, this shouldn't be about being in the right state and getting in front of the right judge to get the right decision. That's not fair. And they're not wrong. But but that's the main reason we were looking for some help from Congress. And this eligibility issue in particular has been probably the most important element. When we talk to people in Congress and we talk to their staffs and we say we need the ability to put some rules in place here that can be sustained.

20:56That one in particular is one that most people understand and has a lot to do with why the SCORE Act got a fair amount of traction, even though it hasn't made it out of the house. A lot of people said, yeah, we understand that something like that needs to be universal, needs to be standard, and needs to be enforced. And when people end run around that and go to court to try to figure out some way to get in front of the right judge to get the right decision, that damages the integrity and clarity of the rule book for everybody. That's great, by the way, that the coaches, they call you up to complain about everything.

21:33Those are ones I would send right to voicemail, I think, if I was in your position. No, look, I learn a lot talking to coaches. I learn a lot talking with these.

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23:23How important is it for the NCAA for Congress to get involved? I don't think there's a lot of things Congress needs to do here, but But, you know, spending all kinds of money on lawyers to win most of the cases that involve things like whether the five years to play four is a reasonable rule and the uncertainty that creates across college sports generally is a problem. I think a lot of the state laws that have been written that are designed to give schools in certain states advantages over schools in other states are a problem. One of the things we dealt with state preemption, and that's not just an NCAA issue.

24:09That's a conference issue. I mean, it's hard to run a conference if the rules around how you can play and how you participate and how you recruit and all the rest are different across the 8 or 9 or 10 or 12 schools that are in your conference.

24:26And, look, I think it's challenging to assume that in a world where there's so many other things in front of Congress that we're going to get, you know, sort of widespread attention from everybody. But, you know, we had we had hundreds of supporters on that legislation back in the fall, which says to me that people understood that there are some things that they can do here that would make a difference. And by the way, we've done a bunch of the things they told us to do. multi-year commitments around scholarships, a post-eligibility health insurance program for kids who get hurt while they're playing their sport, if they're still in treatment when they leave school, access to mental health and health and well-being services, academic support, and the house injunction, which basically put in place a mechanism to provide school-based NIL and revenue sharing.

25:23I mean, you know, when I got this job, everybody could talk to kids about NIL except the schools, which I thought was a problem. And so one of the first things I did five or six months after I got the job was proposed a school-based NIL program as part of the NIL piece, because I thought the schools absolutely positively should be able to talk to their student athletes about this and not being able to when everyone else could was just bad for kids and bad for programs and bad for everybody. So I'm glad we got the house injunction done. It was expensive, but it was a lot less expensive than not getting it done would have been.

26:05And I still think it has the potential to create some order out of some of the stuff you and I are talking about. But it's only been in effect for six months. So I'm not willing to, you know, a lot of people are already willing to draw the shade and say, forget it. I don't know. It seems to me that six months is a pretty short window to draw a conclusion about something that took five years to negotiate. Charlie, I want to lob a quick college football question to you. I'm actually, I'm dying to get your opinion on the headlines that were coming out of the University of Washington with the quarterback, Daman Williams.

26:43If something like Like that's, of course, the quarterback that signed a contract to stay at Washington and then entered the portal the next day. And as of this taping, he's back going to Washington. How would you react if that happened with a basketball player or with somebody else within sort of your purview? Well, I think this is a good example of the growing pains associated with having a model where you now give schools and student athletes the ability to negotiate. He was represented by an agent who I assume was qualified and brought all the right capabilities to his side of the table. The school, obviously, I'm sure was well represented as well.

27:33and he signed a contract and the school signed a contract. And when people sign a contract, I think it's expected that they live up to the terms of the agreement that they sign. And in this particular case, based on some of the social media stuff I've seen, he was represented, which I think is important to note here. And I think most of the high-end student athletes who are part of this process are represented, which is good. But I think this is part of the growing pains associated with entering into a world where you do have revenue sharing and you do have NIL agreements, many being negotiated by a lot of different people across that upper echelon of college sports.

28:25um is there something in particular about it that bothered you other than the fact that you know it was kind of a um i think i think what bothered me using circumstance for about a week there i think it was i i think it's it's the idea you described it as growing pains i i think that that a lot of fans looked at it as like all right you signed a deal you're with us and then literally a day later, like, oh, we didn't actually sign a deal. And then it was like, we didn't file it. That's something that could never happen in the NFL, could never happen in MLB. And as college sports started to get professionalized, it just kind of makes the whole ecosystem look so chaotic and like what's going on.