Charles Barkley slams new NCAA president Charlie Baker for plans surrounding NIL

During an interview with CBS’ Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellogg, new NCAA president Charlie Baker laid out some of his plans for NIL after taking over earlier this month. He brought up potential meetings with members of Congress in Washington, D.C. about potential federal legislation.

That didn’t sit well with Charles Barkley.

“Did he say we’re going to ask the politicians to help us? See, that pisses me off already,” Barkley said. “Our politicians are awful people. … I would actually go to people who actually care about basketball. I would put a committee together, I would love for Clark to be on the committee. Get some coaches, get some players and let’s try to work this thing out.

“We can’t ask these politicians nothing. Those people are awful people — Democrats and Republicans. They’re all crooks.”

Barkley was responding to the interview Baker did with CBS in which he talked about some ideas he has to work with NIL in college athletics. Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and Joe Manchin (R-WV) have been working on a bill with hopes of a Spring 2023 release, On3’s Pete Nakos previously reported, meaning help could be coming from a federal standpoint.

Even before talking about federal help, though, Baker — the former Massachusetts governor who just took over for Mark Emmert — said uniformity is one of his goals for NIL regulation.

“I think the other thing I would speak to specifically is trying to create some what I would call consumer protections for families and student-athletes around name, image and likeness, which one of the ADs referred to as the only thing that’s true about it at this point is everybody lies,” Baker said. “So, I would love to create some transparency and accountability about that so that families actually know what they’re getting into, and I would really like to see some sort of uniform, standard contracts so that when somebody signs it, they know they’re signing the same kind of agreement everybody else is signing.”

When it comes to accomplishing those goals, though, Baker said he’s heard from people in Washington about regulating NIL on a federal level. He acknowledged the NCAA could implement its own policy, but that could run into problems with different state laws.

“There’s a couple opportunities,” Baker said. “One is obviously, we’re going to talk some with the folks in Washington about this and there’s a fair amount of appetite to try to deal with this. They’ve been hearing from a lot of the same people I’ve been hearing from.

“But I think it’s incumbent on the NCAA to also develop a program that we believe we could implement if the feds can’t actually put something together on their own. The only problem with it is if the feds do it, all 50 states comply. If we do it, we have to perhaps nudge some states and their collegiate programs into participating because they may have state laws that don’t require that they play.”