Ahead of the NCAA Tournament, NCAA president Charlie Baker spoke with The Athletic about 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 deal, the women’s NCAA Tournament is valued around $65 million per year. That re-set the market for women’s hoops in many ways, but in what tangible ways have you seen that reflected in the ESPN partnership?
Baker: I think the biggest thing is that it has a whole series of baked-in commitments around promotion, distribution and production — the number of cameras, the number of content providers, personalities and all the rest. Last year, it was monstrous. I think we had so much production capacity that they ran out of room at the venue in Cleveland, which even with pro teams and circuses and everything else that goes through there, I don’t think it had ever happened before. From our point of view, they’ve already started doing storytelling and promotion around this, and I have a feeling they’ll just do it all the way through the month of March and up to and including the Final Four in Tampa. There’s a real runway here with respect to how they’re thinking about it and how we’re thinking about it.
With units being introduced to the women’s NCAA Tournament this year, how much do you think it’ll change the conference’s incentivization to invest in women’s basketball?
Baker: I’ve talked to coaches and ADs who, unprompted by me, brought this up and expressed how excited they were about it and how much it was going to help them make the case — either on their own campus or at the conference level — about the importance growth, opportunity and potential with respect to women’s basketball. These things are kind of self-reinforcing. You have a great conference tournament, you have a great NCAA Tournament, tons of visibility, tons of fans and all the rest, and it has a big impact on how you think about the next year, right? And we’ve gotten to the point now where people really do believe that this is a place where, if you invest, people will come. And I think for a lot of the folks that I’ve talked to, the performance fund is literally a monstrous statement about possibility and opportunity in the future, which obviously is part of the reason you want people to invest, because they believe that there will be a benefit to investing. I think the last few years have pretty much convinced everybody that there’s a very high ceiling here, and they should be chasing it.
In this new NIL era, in which all deals over $600 need to be approved by the NCAA’s clearinghouse (which will be run by Deloitte), one of the biggest fears I’ve heard from stakeholders is that opportunities might be missed because of delays or backlogs. For example, if a player has an opportunity to capitalize on a specific March Madness moment but needs to get through red tape, could they lose out on opportunities and money? Do the NCAA and Deloitte have a plan for this whether that be staffing up at certain times of year or specific units that work with specific sports to deal with the ebbs and flows of the athletic calendar?
Baker: Creating a structure around this will eliminate the ambiguity of the fake offers, the false promises and the misrepresentations that I’ve (heard about) in conversations with student-athletes over the past couple of years, who were promised something that never materialized because the collective or the booster, or whoever the hell it was, found somebody better. That way of doing business, for all the benefits that some of the kids at the high end might get, has not been particularly positive for a lot of kids who make up that big group of student-athletes, who go into the portal based on a set of commitments that are made to them and then find there’s nothing for them at the end. So, I’m all in on creating process, transparency and accountability around how this works. Deloitte made a commitment that they will move really quickly — like 24-hours quickly on stuff if they need to.
I think the big issue on some of this stuff, may be on our end, to work with the schools and the conferences to figure out — there’s going to be a template for all the work that’s being done right now to set this all up. And the good news with respect to the basketball tournaments is this (clearinghouse) goes live post this year’s tournament. So, we basically have the better part of a year to figure out exactly how to deal with the issue you’re raising. And that’s legitimate. We had that happen last year. We had some folks on both the men’s and women’s side who had that one bright shining moment, right? And it translated into some 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 huge growth of women’s college basketball has happened because of the 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 the growing parity (and how it could change a program’s investment in women’s basketball), are you worried future growth could be hampered?
Baker: I actually think the opposite. I think you’ll have more people playing in the space if they know that it’s legit. I don’t think there’ll be less. And I also think having an institutional NIL program, where you have a direct connection between schools and 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 there are student-athletes out there saying, they misrepresented this or they didn’t follow through on this or they made this commitment and they didn’t do it. That’s really problematic for schools. So, I think you’re going to see schools take this very seriously, and that accountability, I think, will play well for young people. I also think you’ll find more people who are interested. You’re talking about a billion dollars, plus or minus, in the first year with respect to the institutional piece. I also think you’re going to find that there are going to be people who will play in the third-party space if they think there’s a structured process in place. I think that actually will encourage more folks to get into the space, not less.
There has been a lot of reporting around a potential vote coming this spring to expand the men’s NCAA Tournament to 72 or 76 teams. Would that vote also cover the women’s tournament? And if so, would it also expand immediately to the same number?
Baker: If we expand the tournament, we’re expanding both of them. To some extent, if you think about the calendar, it’s pretty tight. So, you have Selection Sunday and then the tournament basically starts three days later, and it needs to end right around the time Major League Baseball, golf and a whole bunch of other things start in mid-April. It’s not like the window there is really big, which is why expanding it would have to be a relatively modest expansion. And part of the rationale for it is that we all believe in and support creating as much access to the tournament as we possibly can, which is why we have a really robust automatic-qualifier program. But every year, there are a few teams that you know are right on the edge, but if we can figure out a way to create a little more inclusivity, I think we would like to do it 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. That’s never even been debatable.
Women’s basketball has historically 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 not surprising that women’s sports has become a flashpoint in political conversations. On that point, in February, the NCAA Board of Governors voted to follow the Trump administration’s Executive Order around trans participation in college sports, stating, “A student-athlete assigned male at birth may not compete for an NCAA women’s team.” Do you support that decision?
Baker: The Board of Governors had been talking about that issue for almost a year heading up to that decision. And as an organization, we’d expressed on a number of occasions to folks in Washington on both sides of the aisle that clarity on this is important, because there are all sorts of state laws and individual cases now that go in a variety of different directions here, and at the end of the day, from our point of view, having clarity at a national level on this issue is helpful. And the President’s Executive Order and the memo that went out from the Department of Education on this issue created clarity that we thought was important, and the board made the decision after a year’s worth of conversation about this to adopt it.
(Photo of Charlie Baker: Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
