NCAA president addresses officiating, prop bets and 3-point line correction

CLEVELAND — NCAA president Charlie Baker is in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse Sunday afternoon for the women’s NCAA championship game and while Baker didn’t want to make a prediction for South Carolina-Iowa, he did share thoughts on the state of women’s basketball, how the sport can maintain this momentum once Caitlin Clark leaves school and the issues sports gambling presents across the NCAA.  Baker celebrated one year on the job at the beginning of March.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity.

What do you make of the attention this tournament has received? Obviously it seems interest in this sport and this particular tournament is mushrooming — what gives you confidence and hope it’s sustainable? 

The thing that usually drives — I’m a fan first, OK? — and the thing that usually drives fans to events, especially sports events, is stories. You always want that it’s all about just the players and competition, and I would argue that women’s basketball over the course of the past few years has gotten very, very flat relative to where it used to be. There are now 40 teams or so that could beat each other at any time. But you also have really great stories. 

The fact that the games that got played the other night included a rematch from last year between LSU and Iowa and the second game featured, in my opinion, two of the best players in the country in Paige Bueckers from UConn and JuJu Watkins and the three (Ivy graduate transfer) nerds from USC, and then you had another spectacular matchup between UConn and Iowa and now you have a rematch of last year’s semifinal. Both of those teams come with all kinds of great storylines. ... I said this all week, I think the trajectory here is going to continue to go up. 

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Obviously the game is just exploding, but there have some snafus this tournament: The 3-point line, the official who had to get removed at halftime. How do you fix those things, and what would you say to women’s coaches and players who feel like, hey this still isn’t happening in the men’s side, we’re not being treated as equals?

We use the same folks to put the courts together at the men’s and women’s sites and we use the same folks to do the analytics around the officials who serve in the tournament. Those things shouldn’t happen and we gotta make sure they don’t happen going forward. They are in some respects a reminder to us that this tournament is special and because it’s special, we need to be special. 

Another thing Lisa Bluder brought up was officiating — she’d like to see more programs put in place to encourage more officials in women’s basketball, and for their training and development. Is there anything in the works? 

We’re chasing a big initiative around officiating generally. There’s lots of issues around officiating right now. One of the biggest is the treatment they receive from everywhere — from people at attendance at events from people after attendance at events, on social media. That’s no secret to anybody, one of the great challenges everyone has in sports these days at the collegiate level is the beatdown that gets delivered on officials when they perform. That has a pretty big impact on whether people want to be in and stay in it. We have a lot of work to do there, but some of that work needs to come from a lot of the people around the game, which is unfortunate. It’s some of the same stuff the players are dealing with. 

Do you foresee a future where athletes might receive compensation from an event like this, either directly from the NCAA or from their schools? 

I’ve said since I got to the NCAA that we ought to make some changes to how support for student athletes works in Division I and we’ve done a number of things already to deal with that. But I’m not going to get ahead of the membership on this. I’m sure it’s a conversation we’ll be having going forward. 

The inclusion forum is coming up in a few weeks. How important is to continue to make the NCAA and NCAA athletics a place that is comfortable for a diverse group of people? 

Young people are a diverse group of people and at the end of the day our job and our fundamental objective is to make sure young people are comfortable at our events, which is part of the reason again whey the social media stuff is so distressing to me, and sports betting is distressing to me and the fact that the network is spending an enormous amount of time on Caitlin Clark’s prop betting numbers is important to me. And that’s just one more element of it. Our job is to make sure that the kids who play these games and the fans who follow them, and their classmates are in a welcoming environment. And the sports betting stuff, especially the prop betting piece, does just the opposite. 

It’s probably the No. 1 issue I’ve heard student-athletes I’ve talked to talk to me about, which is the harassment and beatdown that comes not only from the betting community but also their own school mates, who no longer think about the kind of conversation we used to have around the dining halls as just chatter, and it’s become currency, which is a real problem. 

Along those lines, two universities, Iowa and Iowa State, were targeted by the Division of Criminal Investigation, there was a fence put around their athletic facilities and most of the students were ruled ineligible. Do you anticipate any kind of changes to the eligibility standards for those who’ve wagered not on their own teams but on other teams, either on campus or off campus? 

There’s two things going on there. One is, what are the rules going to be and the second is, how do you gradate whatever the consequences are if you violate them. 

We’ve already made some adjustments on the gradation associated with some of the issues around violating the policies and there are committees working on, sort of an overhaul of the way we think about all the rules generally. For most of the folks in the membership, I think people want to be fair. But there’s an integrity of the game issue that’s also important, and that’s going to mean that at the end of the day, whatever the policies are, I have a feeling that betting on your own team, betting on your own sport, are going to remain enormously problematic.

In a perfect world, student athletes don’t bet on sports, at least not on college sports. But we need to come up a framework around that that’s gonna be sort of reality-based, and deal with some of the issues that are modest indiscretions. There were a couple kids last year, I don’t remember which schools, who bet on their women’s basketball team, I think they bet 50 bucks. You’ve gotta think about that a lot differently than you think about some of the other issues associated with this. 

I do want to come back to the prop betting thing though. That is, in many respects, one of the most challenging issues I’ve heard student athletes talk to me about. It puts enormous pressure on them socially on their campuses and generally. I think everything we can do to get that out of the college game would be a terrific advancement for them and for the schools. But sports betting, we’re in the top of the first inning on this one, and it’ going to be an enormous challenge for everybody going forward.