NCAA president Charlie Baker calls out predecessor Mark Emmert for lack of engagement

Former NCAA president Mark Emmert is probably fortunate that there weren’t public job approval figures for his job by the end of his tenure. And his replacement, the still-green Charlie Baker, hasn’t shied away from critiquing the regime that preceded him.

That continued on Tuesday, as Baker spoke to the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) and explained how he’s made the rounds, meeting with various NCAA conference leaders since starting the job in March. Emmert caught a stray when Baker brought up the response he got from a number of the conference leaders.

“A lot of times when I have these meetings, people say I’ve never spoken to the NCAA president before,” Baker said, according to Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger.

Baker has visited with 80 of the 97 NCAA conferences in his first 104 days on the job, Dellenger noted.

The former governor of Massachusetts, Baker is helping lead the charge for the NCAA to get some sort of federal Congressional intervention into college sports to protect the amateurism model. Doing some retail politics to build up relationships and capital — personal and political — with various leaders across college sports can serve Baker as he pushes forward. A broad base of support with a cogent, uniform case to make is much stronger than piecemeal complaints from coaches and administrators.

And it’s apparently something that Baker’s predecessor neglected as the NCAA took on water via court rulings and state laws.

On3’s Pete Nakos provided a dispatch from Washington on Baker and college sports leaders efforts to lobby

Nakos reported that Baker was one of the featured speakers on the “What comes next in the Wild, Wild West of college athletics?” panel at the University of Arizona‘s Future of College Sports summit and didn’t pull any punches.

Per Nakos, Baker began by sending blunt message to stakeholders that he knows what he’s trying to achieve. He also shared that he believes the current NIL status quo isn’t good.

Baker wants three things out of a federal bills: an NIL deal registry, agent certification and an NIL standard.

“Well, the NCAA has an NIL working group, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with them,” Baker said. “I would prefer to get a solution that deals with state preemption, and you heard some of them in here. But in the absence of that, we do need to work our process and figure out what we propose to do as an alternative and get it done by the end of the year.”

Read the full report here.