NCAA President Mark Emmert today said he is hopeful that changes to NBA Draft guidelines could come before next June’s event to address the one-and-done phenomenon in college basketball. Speaking at the opening session of the ’15 IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, Emmert called the NBA's requirement for players to attend college for one year before going pro “utterly antithetical” to the NCAA’s mission. In a 30-minute interview, Emmert said discussions with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver have gone well, though he did not mention the NBPA, which wants athletes to be able to play straight out of high school. When asked whether changes could come this year, Emmert said, “We don’t know. We hope so. We’re working closely with them. They’re being really, really good about it. We’ve got to do a much better job on our end. That’s an area where we have dropped the ball.” Emmert also called for new NCAA rules prohibiting the recruitment of young teenage athletes, saying that universities and students are almost certainly making bad decisions when they plan college careers for middle schoolers. “There’s not enough time and information for anybody to make a sensible decision,” he said, “so I would very much like to see the membership deal with rules in that space preventing that.” During the wide-ranging talk, Emmert said the NCAA’s contract with Turner/CBS gives it the authority to reject advertisements during the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and that the organization will reject daily fantasy ads in March.
FINDING MORE TIME: Emmert said one of his top goals is to find time for athletes to step away from sports -- even if players and coaches do not like it. Student athletes ought to be able to commit to internships, or to travel abroad, for instance, the same as other students. “I’d try to find blocks of time for students,” he said, “whether it’s a day or two a week, whether it’s a block of time in the postseason or a block of time in the summer, where they don’t have any athletic responsibilities. And we’ve failed to do that for them.” That subject arose in the context of the NCAA’s student athlete advisory committee, which is surveying students for suggestions on how to improve their experience. Emmert downplayed any widening of the gulf between “haves and have-nots” as a result of new cost-of-attendance stipends, saying resource disparities are intrinsic. He also dismissed renewed concerns over how few college athletic departments generate a positive bottom line. “That’s one of the great fallacies of this,” he said. “People think schools play sports because they make so much money on it, and they absolutely don’t.” Emmert also said progress on simplifying athletic eligibility and amateurism rules is coming, but is a slow process. “It’s like the tax code,” he said. “Everything went into the tax code for some reason, and everyone remembers why some rule got put into the rule book, and when you go to take it away, you have that debate and discussion.”
NO FEAR OF PROTESTS: In the aftermath of the Missouri football team’s strike in the midst of widespread campus protests earlier this year, Emmert said he is not worried that a team might use that leverage to protest athletic-specific issues. “I don’t fear it,” he said. “I think it’s entirely possible, but I don’t think it’s something we should fear.” Noticeably, Emmert did not use the phrase “student athlete” much in his interview, instead simply calling athletes “students.” An astute audience member noticed and asked why. “To me, they are students who happen to be athletes,” Emmert said. “And I think there’s just been way too much made of that descriptor. It’s like the word 'amateur.' It ignites more than it resolves.”
