NCAA President on a New Era for College Sports

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Journal - NCAA President on a New Era for College Sports

Release Date: June 24, 2025

Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Journal, hosts Jessica Mendoza and Ryan Knutson delve into a landmark moment in college sports history: the Federal Judge's approval of a $2.8 billion settlement between the NCAA and a coalition of current and former student-athletes. This settlement marks the first time colleges can directly compensate their athletes, fundamentally transforming the landscape of collegiate athletics. To unpack the significance of this development, Mendoza interviews Charlie Baker, the newly appointed President of the NCAA.

Overview of the Landmark Settlement

Jessica Mendoza opens the discussion by outlining the monumental changes introduced by the settlement:

• Financial Implications: Schools can now collectively pay athletes up to $20.5 million per year starting July [00:29].
• Back Pay and New Systems: The settlement includes retroactive payments for former athletes and establishes a framework for ongoing athlete compensation.
• Regulatory Challenges: Implementation will require addressing payment regulations, gender equity, and maintaining fair competition [00:29].

Interview with Charlie Baker

Introduction to Charlie Baker

At [02:43], Charlie Baker introduces himself as the NCAA President, previously the Governor of Massachusetts. Mendoza inquires about his unexpected transition from politics to collegiate sports leadership.

Embracing Change

Baker explains his motivation for embracing athlete compensation:

"It just seemed to make sense to me... these seem very similar to me. I don't know why we can't figure out a way to play in this space." [05:12]

He highlights the parallels between the rise of digital content creators like Bo Burnham and the evolving landscape of athlete compensation, emphasizing the necessity for the NCAA to adapt.

Significance of the Settlement

When asked if the settlement represents the most significant change in college sports, Baker responds:

"I certainly think it's one of the biggest moments because it creates a federally approved framework for schools to directly purchase NIL rights from their student athletes." [04:04]

He acknowledges that while foundational changes like the creation of the NCAA and Title IX are monumental, this settlement stands as a pivotal moment in addressing longstanding debates over athlete compensation.

Distribution and Regulation of Funds

Mendoza probes into the mechanics of fund distribution and regulatory oversight:

"The four most well-known conferences... are responsible for creating a process to manage, administer and enforce the rules..." [08:47]

Baker details the establishment of the College Sports Commission and its role in tracking expenditures, managing rosters, and ensuring transparency through annual reporting. He emphasizes the collaboration with major conferences and third-party platforms like Deloitte to oversee NIL activities.

Addressing Equity Among Schools

The discussion shifts to the fairness of the $20.5 million cap, especially concerning schools with varying athletic budgets. Baker responds:

"In the old system... was unmanaged, unaccountable and completely non-transparent. At least now we actually have rules." [11:12]

He cites the recent diversity in the College World Series as evidence that the new system fosters competitiveness beyond traditional powerhouses, suggesting that transparent regulations will allow all institutions to thrive based on their strengths.

Impact of Title IX

Post-break, the conversation explores Title IX's role in shaping the distribution of payments:

"There will be thousands and thousands of women playing college sports who will be scholarship in the future, who weren't scholarship in the past." [14:05]

Baker anticipates significant growth in female athletic scholarships and underscores the NCAA's commitment to gender equity, highlighting increased visibility and investment in women's sports as drivers for this positive change.

NCAA's Petition for Limited Liability

Mendoza raises the topic of the NCAA's request for an exemption to gain legal immunity. Baker clarifies:

"I'm looking for limited liability so that we can make and enforce rules around certain things like academic performance and eligibility." [16:28]

He stresses that the exemption is specific to safeguarding the NCAA's ability to uphold academic and eligibility standards, not a broad immunity, ensuring that student-athletes' academic achievements remain paramount.

Redefining Amateurism

The term "amateur" in the context of student-athletes is scrutinized. Baker expresses a preference for emphasizing the student aspect over athletic status:

"I would much rather have us focusing on what I would describe as... a robust program around academic performance." [19:58]

He notes the elimination of 153 bylaws related to amateurism, advocating for a focus on student well-being, mental health, and academic success rather than the contentious debate over athletic status.

Conclusion

As the conversation wraps up, Baker reflects on the future:

"This is very much going to be kind of a 90 10, maybe even a 95, 5 game with respect to who's actually going to be benefiting in a really significant way from this." [20:04]

He anticipates that while the majority of benefits will accrue to a select group of top-tier programs, the introduction of accountable and transparent systems marks a promising new chapter for collegiate athletics. Baker invites listeners to observe and engage with the evolving dynamics, underscoring the NCAA's commitment to adapting and refining its approach.

Final Thoughts

This episode of The Journal provides an in-depth exploration of a transformative era in college sports. Through insightful dialogue with Charlie Baker, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the settlement's implications, the NCAA's strategic responses, and the broader societal impacts on student-athletes and educational institutions alike.

Key Takeaways:

• A $2.8 billion settlement allows colleges to compensate athletes directly, marking a historic shift.
• The NCAA establishes the College Sports Commission to oversee and regulate fund distribution and NIL activities.
• Title IX enhancements are expected to significantly increase female athletic scholarships and investments.
• The NCAA seeks limited liability to efficiently enforce academic and eligibility standards.
• The redefinition of "amateurism" focuses on student welfare over athletic status debates.

For more insights into the intersection of money, business, and power in sports, tune into The Journal co-produced by Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Transcript

[Jessica Mendoza]

Earlier this month, college sports changed forever.

[Unknown]

A major change to College Sports. Here, $2.8 billion in a settlement now clearing the way for colleges to pay top student athletes is a giant moment in the history of college sports. And it's so significant because schools can now directly share revenue with athletes after generation.

[Jessica Mendoza]

A federal judge approved a settlement worth more than $2.5 billion between the National Collegiate Athletic association or the NCAA and a group of current and former college athletes. Now, for the first time ever, schools can pay athletes directly. The settlement includes back pay for some former college athletes, and it'll create a new system where every Division 1 school can choose to pay athletes up to $20.5 million per year collectively. Schools can start paying athletes in July, but there's still a lot to iron out, from regulating payments to new issues around gender equity and ensuring fair competition. To talk about the deal and what it means for college sports, I sat down with Charlie Baker, the president of the ncaa.

[Charlie Baker]

You know, if you do the math, it's pretty clear that somewhere in the vicinity of a billion dollars will be shared with student athletes every year at a minimum starting next year. So, yeah, it's huge.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 24th. Coming up on the show, the president of the NCAA on how this landmark settlement changes College sp Foreign.

[Unknown]

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[Charlie Baker]

What you can achieve.

[Unknown]

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Can you introduce yourself, please and just tell us who you are?

[Charlie Baker]

Sure. This is Charlie Baker. I'm the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

[Unknown]

And today you're the president of the ncaa. You were previously the governor of Massachusetts. Some of the things that your predecessors have done after office was join the US Senate or work in private equity for you. Why the ncaa?

[Charlie Baker]

That's a really good question because it certainly wasn't on my radar. I got a call right around Halloween of 22, sort of 60 days before I left office from a friend of mine who said he had met with the search firm searching for the next president of the ncaa. And when he heard what they were looking for, he thought of me. So I got the job Description. I showed it to my wife and she read it and she said, this really does sound like you. I mean, The NCAA has 180 committees and it writes bylaws and it has. It sounds a lot like a governor type, governance type model.

[Unknown]

Well, let's talk about this big moment for your organization. This settlement between student athletes and the NCAA that was recently approved by a.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Federal judge five years in the making.

[Unknown]

You've called this moment a new beginning. And obviously the headlines have proclaimed this the most significant change in college sports. Do you agree with that?

[Charlie Baker]

Well, obviously the creation of the NCAA was bigger, and I would argue that, but I would also argue Title IX was bigger. I certainly think it's one of the biggest moments because it creates a federally approved framework for schools to directly purchase nil rights from their student athletes. But the other thing that's really important about it is it settles a debate and a discussion and a litigation that's been going on for, you mentioned five years. That stuff's been going on. The discussion's been going on for probably 20. And the back damage payments that the NCAA and the membership are going to make to previous student athletes, I think those go back eight or nine years. So, yeah, it's a really big deal.

[Unknown]

And you were talking about how long this discussion and debate has been going on. This change is one that the NCAA fought against for a really long time. This idea that college athletes should be paid. You have embraced it under your tenure. Can you talk about why?

[Charlie Baker]

Well, I, you know, after I'd been at the NCAA for about six months, I. I put out a position paper that basically talked about this idea of having schools purchase nil rights from their student athletes. And the was because it just seemed to make sense to me. I mean, things have changed a lot over the course of the past few years, and this whole issue of name, image and likeness has too. I mean, I remember 15 years ago, maybe even 20, when the Internet first became kind of a thing. There was a kid, he was probably a teenager who lived a few towns over from us, who was on YouTube writing all these really hilarious original songs. And he's gone on to become pretty famous. He's a guy named Bo Burnham, and he's made a bunch of pretty interesting movies. But this is when he was young. And, you know, eventually he had like 100,000 followers on YouTube and people started buying ad space on his site. And I think it just took a lot longer for college sports to adopt something that was going on with young people across almost every other kind of commercial thing you could think of. And I just looked at it and said, these seem very similar to me. I don't know why we can't figure out a way to play in this space.

[Unknown]

It seemed to make sense to you already.

[Charlie Baker]

It did. And I started talking to people around the membership about it and you know, and thankfully we found a way to embrace an approach to deal with these issues. And it's expensive. I mean, we're going to pay out $2.8 billion to previous student athletes and put a whole structure in place to manage the injunction in conjunction with our colleagues in the so called power conferences. But I do think it's a new beginning and I think it's a good one.

[Unknown]

So you would say that this is a victory for the NCW despite the fact that it is a lot of money to pay out and there was all that resistance for such a long time.

[Charlie Baker]

I think it's more a victory for the young people. I mean, I certainly think the NCAA needed to get here and I'm glad that we did. But I also believe the whole point here was to create a way for the nil peace to become part of the relationship between the schools and the student athletes. It bothered me when I got this job and I would discover that, you know, we keep pretty good track of kids who go into the transfer portal and you know, roughly a third of them don't really appear to end up anywhere. And I chased a few of them down and I talked to a bunch of them and almost all of them have been coaxed into the portal with false promises and misrepresentations. They gave up the scholarship at the school they were at because somebody told them there was a better deal somewhere else and there really wasn't a better deal for them somewhere else. And I wanted that relationship to be between the school and the student athlete because that's where it belongs.

[Unknown]

I'm glad you brought that up because his wild west has been sort of a term that's come up when it comes to the name, image and likeness era. And as you said, problems paying with students, deals that are super shady. Now that schools can pay student athletes directly. Can you just talk us through how the money is going to get distributed from schools to students, how this all will be regulated?

[Charlie Baker]

Well, the biggest thing is the four most well known conferences, I think, the ACC, the SEC, the Big Ten and the Big 12, they are responsible for creating a process to manage, administer and enforce the rules associated with the way this works. Their representative in this is something that's Newly created, called the College Sports Commission. And that College Sports Commission is gonna own the responsibility and the obligation for tracking the $20 million annual spend that's directly from the schools to student athletes, as well as the third party nil activity and the roster management stuff. And they'll probably be issuing an annual report of some kind on that stuff every year. And they've created two basic platforms for this. One is what they're calling a cap management platform, which each school we've already, you know, we've already done the work, working with them to download all the rosters of all the schools that have said they're going to opt into this system. And they got to submit their data, their rosters and what they're planning to, you know how they're planning to spend their up to $20 million every year. It goes up every year by 3 or 4%. And then every four years it gets recalculated and they're in charge of managing that platform. And then the other one is the third party nil platform, which is being managed by Deloitte. And again, if you're gonna do the deals, you gotta run them through the system and get them approved. And for the first time we're actually gonna have real information on what exactly is going on out there. I mean, up until now, everything you hear is just not really believable because there's no there there to support whatever you might hear from people.

[Unknown]

Let's talk about that 20.5 million cap. It's the cap that schools can spend on paying athletes. But, and this has come up before, different schools have different budgets. There are D1 schools with smaller athletic budgets like Washington State. And you've got Texas, which has huge athletic budget and a lot more flexibility to meet that cap. Is it fair to the schools that don't have that kind of flexibility?

[Charlie Baker]

So, you know, this has been, this is a good example of something where I think we have to wait and see how this plays out a little bit before we draw conclusions. I can tell you this. In the old system we had, when I say the old, I mean like the last three or four years, the system we had for the last three or four years was unmanaged, unaccountable and completely non transparent. And who knows what was going on out there. At least now we actually have rules. But when people say that there's no opportunity anymore for anybody other than the richest schools to succeed, I would just point to this year's College World Series. I mean, everybody said last year when there were four ACC teams and four SEC teams in the College World Series that nil and all the rest have ruined this for everybody else. And yet this year you have eight teams in the College World Series, none of whom were in it last year, and it's the first time since, like, 1957 you have a completely new slate of teams showing up, and three of them aren't in any of those power conferences. I think what's probably going to happen is conferences are going to decide which sports they want to be really good in. And if you're, you know, Ohio State and you're the Big Ten, you're going to be good in a lot of sports. Right? But there's nothing to stop other schools and other conferences from saying, you know, we already have some really great basketball conferences and I expect they will continue to be great. We have some conferences that are really terrific in Olympic sports and women's sports, and I expect they'll continue to be great. And what I've said to a number of people about this is we finally have rules. We finally have federal approval. We finally have a structure that's accountable and transparent and will be issuing reports. And it's operating underneath the watchful eyes of the judge and the plaintiff attorneys. Let's give it a chance to work here and see how it goes. We can make adjustments. People do make adjustments to injunctions.

[Jessica Mendoza]

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll continue our conversation with Charlie Baker about the role of Title IX in this new system and what separates a college athlete from a pro.

[Unknown]

I want to talk about Title ix, Title IX requiring schools to provide equal opportunities to male and female athletes. How do you think Title IX might affect the distribution of these payments to college students?

[Charlie Baker]

Well, I certainly think. I mean, keep in mind that one of the places where there's going to be tremendous benefits as a result of Title IX is in scholarships. Because one of the things this settlement does is it gets rid of the limits on scholarships that have been in place historically, which have dramatically underserved a lot of college student athletes. So, I mean, almost, I would expect coming out of this, there will be thousands and thousands of women playing college sports who will be scholarship in the future, who weren't scholarship in the past. I think that will be true on the men's side as well. But just based on what I've heard schools talk about and what I've heard them say, I there's going to be. I wouldn't call it an explosion, but there's going to Be a very big increase in the number of student athletes who are scholarships on the nil side, the direct nil side, the school based stuff. I think different schools will make different choices. There are certain schools out there that are building big brands for their schools in certain women's sports. And I would expect that that would end up being a big piece of how they think about it. So, for example, UConn in men's and women's basketball. Okay. Carolina in women's basketball, Penn State and women's volleyball, Louisville in women's volleyball, Nebraska, Wisconsin. I mean, there's a bunch of schools that have really significant women's sports programs that they've already made significant investments in. And I would fully expect that they would continue to do that going forward. And one of the great things that's happened in the last few years, and I, I wish I could take full credit for it, but it was coming anyway. There's been a significant increase in both audiences and viewership on women's sports. And if you believe, as I do, that in many cases, a lot of the reasons schools make these investments in sports is to build brand and followership and visibility for their institutions, I think there's kind of nowhere to go but up in a lot of these sports.

[Unknown]

You and the NCAA are petitioning Congress for an exemption that would create some legal immunity for your organization. Can you just talk about why you think you need that?

[Charlie Baker]

I'm looking for limited liability so that we can make and enforce rules around certain things like academic performance and eligibility. There are a lot of folks in Washington, when I've talked to them about this issue around eligibility and around the four years to play five, and the fact that you now have a lot of people who are looking to basically break that through the courts and to have a standard that basically says there is no limit to how long you can play, which would be, I think, a terrible thing to do for all the kids who come after the kids who are playing.

[Unknown]

Now, I do understand that about eligibility, but it sounds like what this exemption would do is protect the NCAA from all kinds of legal action, not just related to eligibility necessarily.

[Charlie Baker]

No, no. But I'm talking about limited liability protection. I'm worried someone's going to come after the academic standard and you got to meet those standards, and those standards are tied to eligibility. Now, if we're going to have people arguing with us in court about eligibility around how many years you can play, you can bet somebody's going to come in with a case at some point around, well, why Is there an academic standard? And the answer is because it matters, since 99% of you are not going to play professionally. And by the way, you know, we just put in a program that gives a core guarantee to every kid in division one where if they need 10 years to graduate, they get to keep their scholarship for 10 years. So the academic piece, I'm not looking for, like a blank, a blanket antitrust exemption. I'm looking for an antitrust exemption to deal with a few issues that I think we can all agree are sort of universal and important to the whole idea of what it means to go to and graduate from college.

[Unknown]

So I'm glad we're kind of talking about the student part of the student athlete. We've been talking about paying these college athletes millions of dollars and then, yes, giving the NCAA potentially a limited exception similar to what pro sports leagues have.

[Charlie Baker]

Ours is much narrower.

[Unknown]

Fair. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is like, when it comes.

[Jessica Mendoza]

To D1 athletes in this new era.

[Unknown]

Can we still call them amateurs?

[Charlie Baker]

You know, I never really liked that word very much, to tell you the truth. I prefer thinking about them as students who play sports. And by the way, We've eliminated about 153 bylaws so far that deal with this question about amateurism, which was done contingent on the settlement being approved. And there's a bunch of others now that it's been approved that we'll be taking a look at as well. I would much rather have us focusing on what I would describe as. And I think this is where the settlement's gonna take us, where we're worrying about things like having a really robust injury surveillance program, having a real robust program around mental health and health and well being, having a really robust program around academic performance, having a robust program around sports betting, which by the way, as a health and wellbeing and a mental health issue is really big issue for kids in big time college sports. I would much rather have us focusing on that stuff and less on this argument about what's an amateur?

[Unknown]

Is the answer refocusing and changing the terminology potentially?

[Charlie Baker]

Well, I certainly think the students who are playing sports in D2 and D3 and in a decent swath of D1 are for all intents and purposes going to continue to be kids for whom that $4 billion in scholarships is going to matter a lot more than nil. I mean, some of them will have nil deals, but they'll be small and. And they'll be helpful and they'll be great. And we have a lot of stuff on our website that they can rely on in terms of financial literacy and how to think about negotiating a contract and all that sort of stuff. But I think this is very much going to be kind of a 90 10, maybe even a 95, 5 game with respect to who's actually going to be benefiting in a really significant way from this.

[Unknown]

Charlie Baker, NCAA President, thank you so much for coming on.

[Charlie Baker]

Well, it's been great to talk to you, and I really would like to see you all spending some time in this space and seeing how some of the stuff that you and I talked about actually plays out over time.

[Jessica Mendoza]

That's all for today. Tuesday, June 24th. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Lane Higgins for help on this episode. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.