Ahead of the NCAA Tournament, NCAA President Charlie Baker spoke with Athletics on a range of topics impacting women’s college basketball, tournament expansion and the future of NIL.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
In the new ESPN Media Rights agreement, the women’s NCAA tournament is valued at approximately $65 million per year. This has redefined the women’s hoops market in many ways, but in what concrete ways have you seen this reflected in the ESPN partnership?
Baker: I think the most important thing is that it has a whole series of built-in commitments around promotion, distribution and production – the number of cameras, the number of content providers, personalities and everything else. Last year it was monstrous. I think we had so much production capacity that they ran out of room at the Cleveland location, which, even with the pro teams and the circuses and everything that’s going on there, I don’t think has ever happened before. From our perspective, they’ve already started telling stories and promoting this, and I have a feeling they’ll be doing it throughout March and up to and including the Final Four in Tampa. There’s a real lead here in terms of how they think about it and how we think about it.
With units being introduced in the NCAA women’s tournament this year, how much do you think that will change the conference’s incentive to invest in women’s basketball?
Baker: I’ve spoken to coaches and ADs who, through no fault of my own, brought this up and expressed how excited they were and how much it was going to help them make the case – whether on their own campus or at the conference level – about the importance of growth, opportunity and potential as it relates to women’s basketball. These things are self-reinforcing. You have a great conference tournament, a great NCAA tournament, tons of exposure, tons of fans and everything else, and that has a big impact on how you look at next year, right? And we’ve gotten to the point where people really believe that this is a place where, if you invest, people will come. And I think for a lot of people that I’ve talked to, the performance fund is literally a monstrous statement about the possibilities and the opportunities in the future, which is obviously part of the reason why you want people to invest, because they believe that there will be an upside to investing. I think the last few years have convinced everyone that there is a very high ceiling here and they should set their sights on it.
In this new era NILin which all transactions over $600 must be approved by the NCAA Clearinghouse (which will be managed by Deloitte), one of the biggest fears I’ve heard from stakeholders is that opportunities could be missed due to delays or backlogs. For example, if a player has the opportunity to capitalize on a specific March Madness moment but has to go through red tape, could they lose out on opportunities and money? Do the NCAA and Deloitte have a plan for this, whether it’s staffing at certain times of the year or specific units that work with specific sports to manage the ebbs and flows of the sports calendar?
Baker: Creating structure around this will remove the ambiguity of the false offers, false promises, and misrepresentations that I have (heard about) in conversations with student-athletes over the past couple of years, who were promised something that never came to fruition because the collective or the booster, or whoever, found someone better. This way of doing business, for all the benefits some high-end kids might get from it, hasn’t been particularly positive for many of the kids who make up this large group of student-athletes, who enter the portal based on a set of commitments made to them and then find out there’s nothing in it for them in the end. So I’m fully committed to creating process and transparency and accountability around how this works. Deloitte is committed to acting very quickly, for example within 24 hours if necessary.
I think the big issue in some of these areas is maybe on our end, working with schools and conferences to understand — there’s going to be a model for all the work that’s being done right now to put this all together. And the good news when it comes to basketball tournaments is that this (clearinghouse) will go live after this year’s tournament. So we have basically a year to figure out exactly how to deal with the issue you’re raising. And it’s legitimate. This happened last year. We had people on the men’s and women’s side who had that shining moment, right? And that translated into immediate opportunities for them, and that’s certainly something that we’re all going to make sure continues to be the case.
Part of the enormous growth in women’s college basketball is due to individual stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers. With increased regulation around NIL and a revenue sharing model that could tip the scales of increasing parity (and how that could change a program’s investment in women’s basketball), are you concerned that future growth will be hindered?
Baker: Actually, I think the opposite. I think more people will play in this space if they know it’s legit. I don’t think there will be fewer. And I think also having an institutional NIL program, where you have a direct connection between the schools and the student-athletes, where there are reputational issues and relationship issues for the schools that are really important to them. They’re not going to want to be in a position where student-athletes are saying they made a false statement or they didn’t follow through on that or they made that commitment and they didn’t do it. This is really problematic for schools. So I think you’ll see schools taking this very seriously, and that responsibility I think will play well for young people. I also think you will find more people interested. You’re talking about a billion dollars, more or less, the first year regarding the institutional aspect. I also think you’ll find that there will be people who play in the third party space if they think there’s a structured process in place. I think it will actually encourage more people to enter this space, not fewer.
There have been plenty of reports about a potential vote happening this spring to expand the men’s NCAA tournament to 72 or 76 teams. Would this vote also cover the women’s tournament? And if so, would it also be immediately extended to the same number?
Baker: If we expand the tournament, we expand both. To some extent, if you think about the schedule, it’s pretty tight. So you have Selection Sunday, and then the tournament starts basically three days later, and it has to end right around the time that Major League Baseball and golf and a whole bunch of other things start in mid-April. It’s not like the window is really big, so its expansion should be relatively modest. And part of that is because we all believe in and support creating as much access to the tournament as possible, which is why we have a very strong automatic qualification program. But every year, you know, there’s a few teams that are on the edge, but if we can find a way to create a little more inclusiveness, I think we’d like to do that if we can make the logistics and the math work. But if we expand it on one side, we’re going to expand it on the other. It was never even debatable.
Women’s basketball has always been at the forefront of social and political conversations. In the WNBA and women’s college basketball, players have used their large platforms to openly push for change. So it’s no surprise that women’s sports have become a hot spot in political conversations. On this point, in February, the NCAA Board of Governors voted to uphold the Trump administration’s executive order regarding trans participation in college sportsstating: “A student-athlete assigned male at birth may not compete for an NCAA women’s team. » Do you support this decision?
Baker: The Board of Governors had been discussing this issue for almost a year before this decision. And as an organization, we’ve repeatedly expressed to people on both sides of Washington that clarity on this is important, because there are now all sorts of state laws and individual cases that are going in a variety of different directions here, and ultimately, from our perspective, having clarity on a national level on this issue is helpful. And the president’s executive order and the Department of Education’s memo on this issue provided clarity that we thought was important, and the board made the decision, after a year of conversation about it, to adopt it.
(Charlie Baker Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
