NCAA President Mark Emmert held a press conference at the Final 4 today and a reoccurring question was about one and dones and John Calipari.
Here are the excerpts:
[B]Q. With all due respect to what you just said, I have to ask you, there are a lot of those 50 who are at this event this week, several candidates to be one‑and‑done. They help make March Madness, a multi‑billion dollar endeavor. How do you reconcile that as the NCAA with this mission to help people get educations? [/B]
PRESIDENT EMMERT: Well, it is what our mission is. Reality is, of course, in any one year we’ve got, I don’t know what the numbers are, maybe 15 out of 5500 kids who are one‑and‑done’s.
While the one‑and‑done’s get an enormous amount of attention, the reality is they’re a tiny, tiny fraction of the student‑athletes who compete in basketball and compete in this tournament and will be competing here in this Final Four.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I would prefer to have a different model. I think most people would prefer to have a model that keeps young men and women in college as long as you can. That’s to their advantage over the long run, we believe. It would be nice if that were the case.
But I don’t think we should blow the one‑and‑done out of proportion and suggest that’s somehow undermining all of academics in the NCAA. It’s 15 kids. They have a chance to go play professionally because that’s what the rules allow and they all want to pursue it, so that’s fine.
[B]Q. Have you talked to anyone at the NBA or the NBA PA about potentially changing that rule into something like baseball has, where you have to go, go three years in college, or what the NFL has?[/B]
PRESIDENT EMMERT: Yeah, I’ve talked to David Stern a number of times about it, and others as well. As you well know, that rule is embedded in the labor contract between the two bodies, so it’s not ours to negotiate or discuss.
But our views on this are widely known. Most of our coaches’ views on it are widely know.
The NBA and NCAA do indeed have different goals. Our goals are to put the best collegiate athletes on the court and provide them with educational opportunities. That’s what we do. The NBA’s interests, of course, are to produce the best professional basketball teams that they can.
So we don’t have a complete commonality of interests, but in some of those areas, we’ll pursue them and do everything we can do to be collaborative.
[B]Q. Mark, I assume you saw the remarks that David Stern made a couple of days ago. Not being there, I’m not quite sure, I think there might have been some playfulness there, but also maybe a serious message. He said the NCAA could require these guys to stay in school if they wanted to. If they didn’t live up to their agreement on the front end, they would forfeit their scholarship money on the back end. Did you see what he said and how do you respond to that?[/B]
PRESIDENT EMMERT: Yeah, I saw some clips on it. I’m sure people want to enjoy making it sound like David and I are debating this. We’re not. First of all, we get along very well and we have good conversations about these and other issues.
There are doubtlessly many things that can be done to encourage our student‑athletes to stay in school that are inside our purview and we’ll continue to pursue those. Changing or academic eligibility standards is one of those that we feel very good about.
On the other hand, there are things that are possible and impossible for us to do. We don’t have a vehicle for mandating that anyone stay in school. So there’s just not a vehicle by which that could occur.
But are we going to continue to pursue things that make it as attractive as possible for people to stay in school and finish their degree? Yes.
I think the important point is that we want students to come to universities so that they can get an education while they are developing their skills and abilities. For that very small proportion that can go play professional sport, we want to help them make that transition as carefully and thoughtfully as they can.
I’m certainly not opposed to people going and playing professional sport. I think that’s terrific. But we write our rules and create our processes for the 5500, not for the 15.
[B]Q. Mark, I know you have a lot of questions about the one‑and‑done. John Calipari has his own opinions about keeping kids in the NCAA, like providing insurance, and like the Olympic model having endorsement deals. Do you have any specific ideas that you’ve come up with that might encourage players to stay in school longer? [/B]
PRESIDENT EMMERT: Well, the Olympic model is frequently brought up as an example of things that we might do in collegiate athletics. There’s a fundamental problem with the comparison. Nobody competes to recruit Olympians. When we have a really great rower, Sweden doesn’t come over and say we have a sweetheart of a sponsorship deal for you if you move over to Sweden and come a Swedish citizen.
In the United States at elite levels, there’s fierce competition for recruiting student‑athletes. If we allowed a sponsorship model like exists in the Olympics, it’s just entirely possible that Auburn and Alabama might compete over who could come up with the sweetest ‑ two random examples ‑ a little bit of a competition over who could come up with the best sponsorship deal. It would immediately become a thinly veiled way to compete with money over student‑athletes.
In terms of the whole notion of us finding other vehicles, we’re constantly looking at it. We don’t have any clear, strong ideas right now about what to do there other than to continue to require them to perform high academically and come in with the skills and abilities to be successful. [B]
Q. Going back to Coach Calipari’s suggestions for things that the NCAA might do to keep players or incentivize players to stay in school longer. I know you said you don’t have any clear ideas yet. One of them was a stipend beyond 2000, which you’re already dealing with. Another one was schools covering the catastrophic insurance. The third thing was allowing them to borrow against future earnings. Can you address the feasibility of those beyond the stipend?[/B]
PRESIDENT EMMERT: We do, in fact, provide catastrophic insurance right now on top of the insurance that’s provided by the institution. So I’m not exactly sure what Coach Calipari was meaning in describing that.
They’re always opportunities to improve those programs, I’m sure. But that is in place and, indeed, it gets exercised fairly routinely when there’s an insurance issue around an injury that exceeds the insurance provided by the institution.
There’s a lot of discussion around various ways in which you can provide money to student‑athletes. There’s people that would like us to do direct compensation, just pay them. There’s people I’ve heard that would like to pay them like professionals. The quarterback makes as much as the quarterback can get. If University X can pay more than University Y, fine, the person goes there.
There’s the sponsorship model. There’s a model where every kid gets $20,000. I mean, all of those things are simply different models of throwing away the collegiate model of athletics.
The whole principle of the collegiate model of athletics is these are college students who play sports. If they want to be professional athletes, those options are available to them and I would encourage them to pursue them and I hope they do well at them.
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