NCAA president Mark Emmert tours Utah State
NCAA President Mark Emmert visited Utah State University on Thursday.
Emmert’s visit began early in the morning, meeting with all of Utah State’s student athletes to speak and answer questions. Then, he toured the facilities before speaking in the George S. Eccles Conference Center to an open audience. He gave a short speech before taking questions from those in attendance.
University president Stan Albrecht introduced Emmert. The two know each other from Albrecht’s service on the NCAA’s board of governors.
“Some of you may be wondering how the NCAA president ends up at Utah State,” Albrecht said. “I know Mark (Emmert) from my time on the board … he and his colleagues visit institutions like Utah State and sort of take our pulse, listen to our students, listen to others and the questions you ask to get a better sense of what is going on.”
During his speech, Emmert explained that the NCAA is an organization consisting of 1,100 schools, 19,000 total teams and 465,000 student athletes.
“It’s hard to imagine the collegiate experience without college sports,” Emmert said.
Emmert also spoke about the important life lessons that student athletes learn from participating in sports and about how well they perform as students.
“Your graduates are better at leadership; they have the ability to overcome failures,” Emmert said. “Maybe what we need to do is be better at that type of education. You’ve got a really cool social-educational experience. As an educator, that’s really hard to do in the classroom, but it gives you that experience in sports.”
Before Emmert took questions from the audience, he explained the three goals that the NCAA has for student athletes. The three things that they focus on are academics, fairness and well-being of the student athletes.
“These three things have been the hallmark of what this organization is all about,” he said. “Over the past few years we’ve been able to really shift our rules for improvements.”
To prove the point, Emmert said that student athletes have better graduation rates across the board. At Utah State, the graduation rate is 44.8 percent according to the university’s website. Among student athletes at USU, the graduation rate is 87 percent, the highest among the four-year institutions in Utah.
He also highlighted the changes to NCAA rules that allow student athletes to retain eligibility, accept or decline scholarships and to get money for food and other necessities for living. After that, he focused on the well-being by speaking about the NCAA involvement in concussion safety and mental health of athletes.
Among popular topics in the question-and-answer session were paying student athletes and how much money the NCAA has and where the money goes.
“Should this no longer be about student athletes?” Emmert said. “Should this be professional athletes getting paid to play? Should they be getting a salary?”
Emmert explained that if you pay athletes, it becomes fully a business and only two sports earn money; men’s basketball and football. Along with the two sports, only 22 athletic departments across the country had a positive cash flow last year.
The money earned from football goes to the College Football Playoff gets split up between conferences and teams in the bowl games and the CFP, which runs separately from the NCAA. The men’s basketball tournament is the only championship of the 90 the NCAA puts on that makes money.
The 68-team tournament makes about 800 million dollars each year. From that money, 500 million goes to the schools based on enrollment and how many teams from each conference make it to the tournament and how many games each team wins.
After that, 100 million goes to schools for supplemental support, universities can use it how they want. Then, 150 million supports the other championships that the NCAA supports.
“Women’s basketball loses 14 million by itself,” Emmert said. “Once you get done splitting the money up, there isn’t much left. We can’t tell someone how much to pay a coach. We can’t tell them how to use the money they get.”
Emmert also responded to questions about bridging the gap between student athletes playing in college and getting jobs after school.
“We take a poll every year (in men’s basketball) and 75 percent say they will be in the NBA,” Emmert said. “Only 1.5 percent really make it … Employers like hiring athletes but don’t know exactly why. We need to be better promoting them.”
Lastly, Emmert spoke about the new television contracts and what the future might bring for collegiate athletics.
“I think it’s going to be really fun to see where this all goes,” he said.
— kalen.s.taylor@gmail.com
Twitter: @kalen_taylor