3:44 PM
The recent round of conference realignment and other developments within the industry has caused trust and collegiality within college athletics to suffer.
Relations between leagues and individuals are worse today than at any time during his tenure, according to Emmert. He said that it's a problem for the industry when powerful people criticize each other in public.
The Big 12 commissioner made strong comments after Texas and Oklahoma announced they would be joining the SEC.
"When you have these kinds of moves, it's hard to keep up," he said. The NCAA and higher education are self-regulations. There is no ministry for education or sport. The schools are regulated by each other. Sports is an example of that. That is dependent on cooperation and trust.
"If you can't regulate an environment on trust and good communications, you've got a big problem."
With major developments around college sports such as name, image and likeness rules, and a forthcoming NCAA constitution, Emmert is hopeful that trust can be repaired. The NCAA's constitution committee released a new draft of the document on Monday that would focus on welfare for college athletes.
People have to set aside some personal anxieties and frustrations and look at the common interest of the enterprise when working together on all these issues, including what we're doing now to reconstitute that, especially the Division I structure. It's going to take time, but we'll get there.
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione called Bowlsby a dear friend and said he understands why it was difficult to digest the departures from the Big 12.
"We didn't have a plan to handle it that way," Castiglione said. The timing wasn't ours to decide. It necessitated a different plan when rumors broke.
Heading into a very contentious election year, Emmert acknowledged the difficulty of doing federal NIL legislation, while also repeating his desire for Congress to do so. He spoke with several U.S. senators who support federal legislation.
Although there is no federal policy, the NCAA is investigating several agreements and has found that most schools are following guidelines correctly. Emmert didn't say how many investigations are taking place.
"We need to have national clarity on what the rules are," he said. We can't do that without Congress.
The NCAA is looking at recommendations from a law firm after the men's and women's basketball tournaments. The NCAA committees will decide how to proceed, despite the fact that he supports holding the men's and women's Final Fours in the same location. A joint Final Four site could be named in 2027.
The NCAA is not involved in governing the College Football Playoff, but president Mark Emmert said that winning a championship in a power conference "ought to mean something." Automatic qualification for power conference champions has become a sticking point in expansion discussions, as the initial 12-team model includes spots for the six highest-rated conference champion and six at-large teams.
Craig Thompson, part of the group that proposed the model in June, said he expects a 12-team playoff to be approved but he isn't sure when.
The recent college football coaching carousel and record-setting contracts for several coaches were addressed by Emmert, Thompson and others. The NCAA and conferences can't cap the salaries of coaches.
"We're spending money that we don't have, and we're making efforts in areas that we're going to have to look at differently," Thompson said.
