Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker will be the next president of the NCAA, the organization announced Thursday.
Baker will take over the organization effective March 1. He succeeds Mark Emmert, who assumed his position in 2010.
Baker is the sixth CEO of college sports' largest governing body, and the first to come outside the NCAA system. Emmert and his predecessor, Myles Brand, were both university presidents before leading the NCAA. He has never worked in sports or academia before, working the entirety of his career in Massachusetts state politics and health care administration. (He did play JV basketball at Harvard.)
Baker's term as Massachusetts governor ends in January; he did not seek re-election.
Baker will be expected to lead the NCAA through the various challenges related to payment of college athletes, through third-party means (NIL) and/or through the process of recognizing athletes as university employees.
In terms of football, he'll have to navigate the expansion and professionalization of the game and its relationship to the remainder of college athletics. Up until now, the NCAA's strategy for navigating the biggest existential challenge in its 116-year existence has been, "Hope Congress figures it out for us." The expectation will be that Baker's experience running a state government will be to either come up with a workable solution... or to whip enough votes on Capitol Hill.
"We know that to be successful, the NCAA president needs to possess the ability to balance competing priorities, inspire a shared vision, and create a broad sense of trust," said Grant Hill, an independent member of the NCAA Board of Governors and member of the presidential search committee. "As Governor of Massachusetts and a successful private sector CEO, Charlie Baker has demonstrated the type of results-oriented, bipartisan approach that we will need to bolster the well-being of student-athletes, realize the opportunities and overcome the challenges facing the NCAA."
His experience outside of college, sports and college sports continues the trend of entities hiring CEOs from the business and/or political world. Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark also did not work in college athletics before assuming their positions.
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