Somebody had to do it. Mark Emmert and company have clearly lost control and were sitting back content to watch the whole of the NCAA be thrown into disarray. Thankfully, the NCAA Board of Directors stepped in to overrule the president’s office and grant the autonomy that the Power Five schools started out requesting and ended up demanding.
Guys like Mike Slive and Jim Delany do not resort to outright threats very often. They don’t have to. Their position and personal status demand respect from anyone paying attention to what is going on in college athletics today. Slive is the Commissioner of the SEC and Delany that of the Big Ten. Two of the five schools that make up what has now become known as the Power Five.
They asked for the autonomy to govern their conference as they see fit and not have to go running to the NCAA for answers and solutions that have become more and more dated and unhelpful in addressing the problems existing for today’s student athletes. However, Emmert’s office did everything to block that autonomy right up until his own Board of Directors overruled him and let the big conferences have their way.
In doing so the Board might well have saved the NCAA from falling apart. Otherwise and the Power Five could well have gone off on their own and started their own association. No doubt the big TV Networks would be knocking on their door for television broadcast rights within hours after the formation of such a group of schools breaking off from the NCAA.
In addition to the SEC and the Big Ten we also have the ACC, the Pac-12 and the Big 12. Commissioner Slive came right out and asked the board to please adopt the autonomy policy or risk what he called a ‘de facto Division IV’. These are the biggest and most powerful conferences in American collegiate athletics today and just the idea of them splitting off from the NCAA would be unthinkable.
So now each conference has the ability and the responsibility to form their own student athlete welfare agenda, clean up the current confusing transfer rules, and try to establish some kind of lifetime medical coverage insurance to cover athletes hurt while representing the university. There are many more points that are sure to come up now that the conferences have the power to deal with them autonomously.
And after all the thousands of words written and spoken on the networks about paying student athletes, it looks like that’s exactly what’s about to happen. They won’t call it paying them outright. It will be labeled a ‘stipend’ or something like that, but it will be monies paid to the athletes over and above the cost of housing and tuition.
