Media reaction to last week’s Division I Presidential Retreat was generally favorable, especially if you grade on a curve to allow for the sportswriter Grinch factor.
Dennis Dodds of CBSSports.com was positively effusive. During the proceedings, he Tweeted the following:
dennisdoddcbs Dennis Dodd
The NCAA presidents have moved more in the last two days, then they have in the last 60 years. Seriously.
dennisdoddcbs Dennis Dodd
We’ll have to see what actually gets through the meat grinder, but this is huge.
dennisdoddcbs Dennis Dodd
Wonder what Walter Byers is thinking right now?
dennisdoddcbs Dennis Dodd
…This is beyond politics. NCAA suits have never mentioned some of these words before — ever.
dennisdoddcbs Dennis Dodd
Kudos to NCAA CEOs. If they put in half the stuff they just talked about it will be major.
(I think I can help with the Byers question. The NCAA’s original executive director is living in Kansas on the family ranch and, from what I hear, generally regards college sports as a closed chapter in his life. He still stays in touch with a tight group of former associates, but I doubt if he was tracking much on last week’s events.)
As you might imagine, the NCAA staff monitors what’s written about college sports, and it appears that most of the coverage of the retreat was either neutral or positive. In general, commentators believed the presidents were charting the course for a fresh approach and that they demonstrated a will to succeed.
One notable outlier was Pete Thamel of the New York Times. He was determined to write that (a) commissioners are running the show in Division I sports and (b) that the retreat was cheapened because Big Ten and Southeastern Conference Commissioners Jim Delany and Mike Slive didn’t attend. The fact that those conferences were represented at the retreat by 10 presidents did nothing to sway Thamel.
Here was the exchange between Thamel and Emmert at Thursday’s post-Board of Directors news conference:
Thamel: “There’s a perception out there, Mark, fair or not, that Jim Delany and Mike Slive were able to strong-arm their guys through and get eligible, and in the case of Ohio State it really backfired and provided a black eye for both the NCAA, I think, and Ohio State. Can you address that perception (a) Mark and (b) talk about the power of conference commissioners right now in college sports with them being billionaire negotiators and fireman compliance guys and is there a concern that those gentlemen, er, conference commissioners in particular have become too powerful?”
Emmert: “I think, Pete, you’ve seen in the past week or two conference commissioners being active partners in trying to address some of the issues we’re describing right now. My experience with all those individuals and their presidents is they’re very like-minded about addressing the serious integrity issues in intercollegiate athletics. The notion that they are exercising undue influence in our decision-making in the NCAA office is just plain wrong. People who want to believe that are going to believe it, but I know the facts, and that’s just contrary to the realities of the day.”
Thamel: “(Delany and Slive) are considered, Mark, as two of the most powerful guys in college sports. Why weren’t they at these meetings the last two days?”
Emmert: “This was a presidential meeting. This was a meeting about the people who are actually in charge of the NCAA. Conference commissioners work for presidents, not the other way around.”
Thamel: (The recording is garbled, but the question related to how Big 12 Conference Commissioner Dan Beebe and other non-presidents attended the retreat.)
Emmert: “Yeah, well, we had representation from each of the major divisions within Division I. So we had commissioners and ADs from the automatic-qualifier BCS conferences, the six conferences there, we had representation from the non-automatic qualifier BCS’s – those five conferences – one from the FCS’s and from the non-football conferences. So, we asked those individuals to identify a commissioner or an AD that they wanted to have in the room, so for among the BCS automatic qualifiers that was Dan Beebe of the Big 12.”
Here’s what came out of that exchange in Thamel’s story in Friday’s New York Times:
“Two key people who did not attend the meetings were Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, and his counterpart in the Big Ten, Jim Delany. Few would dispute that they are the most powerful men in college sports. Although the presidents of Hope College and Molloy College [they attended, representing Divisions II and III] might have provided keen insight into the future of college athletics, they are not exactly the rainmakers.
“That is because conference commissioners have become ever more powerful in the past decade. Their duties include being chief negotiators of billion dollar television contracts, administrators of coach and player punishment, and compliance firemen.”
“Slive and Delany are as much a part of the problem as they are a part of the solution. Since Mark A. Emmert became president of the NCAA last year, he has been pummeled in a blur of controversies, highlighted by the cases of two quarterbacks: Cam Newton, whose father shopped him to Mississippi State before Newton enrolled at Auburn, and Terrelle Pryor, who sold memorabilia while at Ohio State.
“Emmert basically inherited these problems, but he has also perpetuated them. The Auburn and Ohio State situations were made worse because of the actions of Slive and Delany, and the feeble reactions of the NCAA.”
I’m a big fan of the New York Times, but what kind of Alice in Wonderland world is it when a reporter essentially quotes his own question rather than the response he was provided? A highly truncated version of Emmert’s response finally showed up several paragraphs later, after Thamel got everything off his chest.
Nobody’s asking anybody to pump sunshine about the many problems that currently face college sports, but is it too much to ask for reporters to keep an open mind?
