MYSTERIOUS: Ncaa president charlie baker s bold proposal could spur transformative changes - What They Never Told You

NCAA president Charlie Baker is trying to execute a political process. It’s a playbook he knows quite well as the former governor of Massachusetts. That is the impetus behind the letter he released in December outlining a bold and transformative vision for college athletics. It was three-pronged: allow for schools to offer enhanced educational benefits, allow them to enter into name, image and likeness deals directly with athletes and create a new subdivision where the higher-resourced schools can increase investment in athletes and set their own rules. It was a starting point, but to his surprise, it was treated as a finished article and formal proposal by some in the membership.

“In government you set the table, right?” Baker said to reporters on the eve of his state of the NCAA address to administrators across all three divisions at the NCAA Convention for the first time. “You file a bill. You don’t expect to get it back the same way you file that. You don’t think it’s written on a stone tablet. It’s a place to start. And I met with all 97 conferences during my first 150 days or so. I’ve met with 30 of them again. I plan to meet with all of them every year. And there was overwhelming interest in doing something like this.”