Could NCAA go way of VHS with new leader?
The next president of the NCAA will be required to follow orders, often from clueless stakeholders whose hubris led them to an entirely foreseeable predicament. There will be no point in complaining about this.
The next president of the NCAA should accept reality and refrain from protesting change. Forcing the world to go back to the 1990s isn’t an option anymore.
Most importantly, the next president of the NCAA needs to be comfortable showing up to work every day for a job that in 2022 has no real reason to exist.
If the NCAA hasn’t reached out yet to Sandi Harding, it should.
For the past 18 years, Harding has worked for a company called Blockbuster, an erstwhile behemoth that used to operate about 9,000 video stores worldwide. Today there’s exactly one left.
It’s in Bend, Ore., and Harding is the general manager.
Known as the “Blockbuster Mom,” thanks to her star turn in a documentary released on (fittingly enough) Netflix, Harding doesn’t mind being viewed as a relic. She and her staff still work on quartercentury-old computers with floppy disks and they don’t dwell on what might have been. Per multiple reports cited in the documentary, Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix for $50 million in 2000, but turned it down. Ten years later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.
In 2019, two stores still were operating under the company’s name. But when the one in Perth, Australia, closed, the location in Oregon became “The Last Blockbuster.”
“Every day, even before (the publicity), people would drive by and see the ‘Open’ sign and say, ‘Oh, my gosh. How are you still here? Why are you still here?’ ” Harding told the Washington Post.
It would be understandable if those same questions are now being asked of the NCAA, the governing body whose mission since its inception in 1906 essentially has been to preserve and protect the concept of amateurism.
These days, preserving VHS tapes seems like a more reasonable goal.
When Mark Emmert, the much-maligned, grotesquely compensated, longtime public punching bag of college sports’ governing body, announced this week that he is stepping down as NCAA president, it prompted some obvious speculation.
Will the university presidents replace Emmert with another figurehead to do their bidding?
Or, when the courts and legislatures finally are finished dismantling the NCAA’s rules for good, will there even be any point?
It depends on whom you ask. Some still think there is a way for the right leader to navigate the age of name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation and maybe even direct pay-for-play and come up with a plan to move forward in a way that makes sense for universities, administrators, coaches and players alike.
But there’s simply nothing in the NCAA’s history that suggests it’s capable of doing that.
Part of it is Emmert’s fault. Under his leadership, college sports could have anticipated the NIL wave, and could have recognized that public sentiment was catching on to the unfairness of a system that generated a billion dollars per year and still clung to “amateurism” as a reason not to allow players to accept what anyone was willing to offer them.
Instead, the NCAA fought lawsuit after lawsuit, and lost. Then, instead of coming up with its own framework for allowing NIL compensation, it deferred to Congress and legislatures. That led to the mayhem of different rules for schools in different states, until no rules at all applied anymore.
The rules, by the way, aren’t coming back. Not every fan loves the idea of NIL collectives spending millions of dollars per year on recruiting classes, or the thought of blue-chip prospects going to the highest bidder. But at least it’s out in the open now. And the programs that thrive won’t be the ones that try to resist. They will be the ones who adapt.
So with that in mind, what role will the NCAA play? Even before Emmert’s announcement, it had become clear that there was no reason to take the organization’s enforcement arm seriously. Kansas, the most recent national champion in men’s basketball, won its title while facing allegations of major violations dating back to 2017. The Jayhawks never have been punished and coach Bill Self was awarded with a lifetime contract during the NCAA’s investigation.
So if the NCAA was useless before the rules went away, what will its aim be now? Proving there’s still a small corner in the world for something most consider obsolete? Simple nostalgia?
If that’s the case, the NCAA might as well hire somebody who knows how to make it work — against all odds. Chances are, they can find a good candidate in Bend, Ore.
On weekends, the last Blockbuster closes at 9 p.m.