[caption id="" align="alignleft” width="298"] (Photo at SI.com)[/caption]
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday July 23, National Collegiate Athletic Association President Mark Emmert was asked, “So with the Freeh report coming out about 10 days ago, did you already have options on the table or did all this happen in a 10-day crunch?” to which Emmert answers, “It all happened in a 10-day time period.”
He didn’t pretend, he didn’t waffle, and he didn’t prevaricate. And he didn’t use the word “crunch.”
Mark Emmert took action swiftly, without apology, and authoritatively. He not only told truth to power: Emmert actually had the guts to take away power from those who misused it.
And he did it without spending 15 years arguing with rich people--donors or powerful alums--or dealing with the letters I’m sure he was getting from the lawyers of rich people about it.
Most importantly, Emmert made his choices with the health of the American university and college system in mind.
I can vouch for this: Mark Emmert has always been the smartest guy in the room. Those of us at UConn realized that when he was more or less running the place here as chief operating and academic officer from 1995 to 1999. Now he’s also shown he’s the best leader imaginable in that weird world of sports.
(Sports are something I’ve avoided both as player and fan entirely since birth. The political implications of sports, however, I must follow--as all of those on every campus must, since we must necessarily follow money and power like ants at a picnic.)
Emmert has brought to the NCAA the kind of leadership and integrity a lot of people not involved with sports no longer associate with sports.
Many who enjoy sports at the college and university level merely shrug their shoulders when they hear the argument that players on money-making college teams are so entirely detached from the institutions themselves that they might as well be employees rather than students of these institutions. Graduation rates are often disastrously low. And, according to many reports, one of the perks of being a college athlete seems to be the idea that student athletes do not have to be students at all--at least not in the usual sense of the word. Some rarely attend classes; many have private tutors; most are not expected to participate in the ordinary life of an undergraduate but are instead treated as celebrities.
If Emmert wants to help change those dynamics for the better, he deserves congratulations. If he is interested in sending a message to any program or--specifically to any “multi-million-dollar coaching entity"--believing it is “above,” “beyond,” or “outside the reach” of the code of good governance or, umm, ethics, morals, and laws, then even better.
“Our business is to focus on whether or not the behavior of a program is supporting the integrity and the ethics and values of intercollegiate athletics,” argued Emmert, in that Times interview, “Is the institution in control of that program and is it doing the right things?”
When asked of Penn State football, the clear answer was “No.” Emmert acted in the best interests of American colleges, universities, students, and yes--athletics programs.