Charlie Baker NCAA President talks the state of college football, responds to Ryan Clark about LSU, NIL shaking up the system, growth of women's sports, political influence on of NCAA rules and solution to college NFL chaos.

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Ryan Clark (0:26)

Charlie Baker took over as the NCAA president in 2023 And let's just say he walked into a mess. He didn't take the traditional road to the job either. He was the CEO, a politician, two-term governor of Massachusetts, actually. I mean, this man is like all Boston. But I'm not sure that anything could have prepared him for what he stepped into at the NCAA. Still, he's proud of some of the progress that he's made. So we just jumped right into it. NIL, Transfer Portal, 5 for 5, 5 for 4, and all these other numbers that you've been hearing around college sports. We break down the changes, what's working, what isn't, and where the NCAA goes from here. But some of the things that Baker is most proud of is the growth of women's sports and the work they've done to protect athletes and the integrity of the game from the pressures of sports betting. We also get into the future of revenue sharing and what that means for student athletes. He knows that there's still a long road ahead. More issues will come, more changes will be needed. But he believes that the NCAA has created more opportunities for student athletes to succeed. He wants that momentum to continue, which by the way means once you go pro, let somebody else play. This conversation couldn't have come at a better time, which is exactly why we're dropping this special Monday episode as the college football season truly gets rolling. So Pivot fam, thank you for the way that you continue to support us. Sit back, listen, and learn from our conversation with NCAA President Charlie Baker. On behalf of me, Chan and Freddie T, we are incredibly grateful.

Well, fellas, I wanted to be on YouTube for a reason. I wanted to give all the young people who aspire to be part of the NCAA and be a student athlete, and to partake in what I think is one of the best experiences in the world, to be able to hear from Charlie Baker. He's the sixth president of the NCAA. This is Fred Taylor, this is Channing Crowder, I'm Ryan Clark, Pivot Family. Thank you for pivoting with us.

What I've been extremely impressed with is, since 2023, the activity the NCAA has shown in trying to correct things that need to be corrected, but also be proactive in putting things in place that give our student athletes the best opportunities to enjoy their experiences while growing.

What has the last, I guess, three years been like for you since taking over from Mark Emmert?

Charlie Baker (3:18)

Well, certainly there's been a significant amount of change over that period of time, some of which was planned and some of which was not. And I would say that the things I'm most proud of that have happened over the past couple of years is, I mean, I, shortly after I got the job, literally within six months, I was looking around and I was thinking to myself, the only people who can't talk to student athletes at this point about revenue sharing are the schools, which seems wrong, just wrong. So I made the first proposal on creating a school based rev share program that eventually morphed its way into the settlement of several long outstanding legal cases so that we had a long overdue opportunity to put in place an actual mechanism that would give schools the ability to share revenue with student athletes across all sports, but especially in the sports that generate significant revenue for the schools themselves. I'm also pretty pleased by the fact that we have a post eligibility health insurance program in place now for kids across all three divisions. If they get hurt playing their sport and are still in treatment after they leave school, that lasts for two years, and if God forbid anybody's got $90,000 worth of expenses after they leave school, they convert automatically into the catastrophic plan, which will cover them until they get better, whenever that might be. We also put core guarantees in for the Division I kids, so if you get a scholarship, you keep it, whether you choose to play or not. You can't run anybody off anymore, and you keep that for 10 years, or as long as it takes to graduate, which for some kids, given everything else that's going on, maybe more than four or five years. I mean, those things in particular to me were sort of long overdue. We've also been very aggressive about some of the issues associated with sports betting, and that was driven completely by what I heard from the kids.