“We need to reconsider delegation of a lot of the things that are now done at the national level,” Mark Emmert told reporters on Thursday.
The president of the N.C.A.A., whose organization was undercut last month by a Supreme Court ruling, said Thursday that the college sports industry should weigh transferring more authority to leagues and schools.
The strategy, which he said would probably need years to take shape after significant deliberations among the roughly 1,100 N.C.A.A. schools, could offer the association a greater shield against litigation. But it would more than likely leave the N.C.A.A. a diminished presence on the American sports landscape and substantially enhance the power of individual leagues.
“We need to reconsider delegation of a lot of the things that are now done at the national level,” Mark Emmert, the association’s president, said in an interview with a group of reporters. Echoing what a number of top college sports figures, including powerful commissioners, have said with increasing fervor, he called for “a whole rethink of this federated model” involving the N.C.A.A., colleges and conferences.
“If you can plausibly say, ‘You know, there’s no reason that that couldn’t be tossed to the conferences,’ the conferences can work out that whole issue or even the campuses,” said Emmert, who suggested that even minor rule violations perhaps should be adjudicated within leagues.
But Emmert, who received a contract extension from the N.C.A.A. in the spring despite his status as a lightning rod for criticism within and outside the college sports industry, largely avoided describing specific proposals for a reorganization of power. Instead, he elected only to lay the groundwork for what he predicted would be a long debate.
Emmert’s campaign for potentially seismic reforms roughly coincides with the judicial equivalent of a shove. Less than a month ago, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, said that the N.C.A.A. could not prohibit its colleges from offering modest payments to athletes. Although the case dealt only with so-called education-related benefits — the justices did not consider, for example, whether players should be paid salaries — the ruling made the N.C.A.A. more vulnerable to antitrust lawsuits.
After the court’s decision in the case, N.C.A.A. v. Alston, association leaders swiftly steered toward a more hands-off approach to regulating how players may earn money from their fame, a shift that many conference executives attributed to a desire to avoid protracted court battles.
“Much of what I’m talking about is, in fact, that new environment, and you can do one of two things,” Emmert said on Thursday. “You can lean back and do nothing and then just wait and see what happens. Or you can say, ‘Look, this is a new era, we need to take advantage of it, pivot as much as we can to the other areas I was just talking about and embrace that change rather than fighting it.’”
The N.C.A.A., though, has long been known for fighting and for its plodding pace, and some people who have sought changes in college sports said Thursday that they believed a decentralization of sorts would amount to just one step in remaking the multibillion-dollar college sports industry.
“From a big-picture standpoint, I think it’s encouraging that there’s some urgency to move away from the status quo because it’s not going to work clearly with the Alston decision,” said Amy Perko, the chief executive of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which has called for broad reforms. “But even before the Alston decision, it wasn’t working.”
Empowering college sports conferences, which have gained outsize influence over the years as media rights brokers, could allow university presidents and chancellors “to make some bold decisions, and they should be able to do that at the conference level with more like-minded schools,” Perko said.
In an interview on Thursday evening, Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, said that N.C.A.A. officials had not presented him with a plan to enact Emmert’s ideas and that he would closely study any proposals. But Sankey noted that proposals in recent years to grant the Power 5 conferences greater control over their operations had encountered resistance.
He also said that college sports leaders could not dawdle on making changes.
“I don’t think we have multiple years to figure this out,” Sankey said. “I didn’t take anything away from the Supreme Court’s commentary in the Alston decision that suggests we have a few years to figure out a new approach.”
Some of Emmert’s concerns are concentrated in sports beyond basketball and football, which fuel the industry’s financial might. He suggested, for instance, that college sports officials consider easing the rules that limit competitions within conferences and the N.C.A.A.’s three divisions.
“We’ve made it pretty complex to go out of conference and how that all works,” Emmert said. “That works fine for basketball, football, a number of sports, but it doesn’t work so well for some others, so we need to be a lot more flexible than we’ve been.”
Emmert said he expected assorted N.C.A.A. boards to consider ideas in the coming months.
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