The NCAA paid former president Mark Emmert $4.3 million in his final year of employment, according to tax records obtained by USA Today.
The $4.3 million represents a $1 million increase from Emmert's compensation over the fiscal previous year; his pay covered the 2022 calendar year and the portion of the 2023 fiscal year in which he worked. Charlie Baker took over as NCAA president on March 1, 2023.
Emmert's tenure, which began in 2010, will forever be remembered as The End of the NCAA As We Knew It.
The landmark O'Bannon v. NCAA decision came down in 2015, and California's Fair Pay to Play Act passed in 2019. In the meantime, a window to get out in front of the inevitable and place reasonable "guardrails" around NIL and the Portal came and went due, in large part, to Emmert's blinding lack of vision.
As an example, here's an excerpt from an Associated Press recap of Emmert's testimony in the O'Bannon trial in 2014.
NCAA president Mark Emmert stuck to his contention that amateurism is the core of college athletics, saying any effort to pay players would destroy a framework that has been in place for more than a century and cause many schools to either abandon sports or refuse to play other schools that do pay.
Emmert said college athletes themselves wouldn't want to play against other athletes who were getting paid.
"They want to know everyone is playing by the same rules," he said. "They want to know the other teams consist of student-athletes just like them."
In December, Emmert's successor, former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, proposed schools begin sharing revenue directly with athletes. Next year, schools can opt to pay their athletes up to $22 million per year as part of a House v NCAA settlement. The NCAA will also pay $1.1 billion directly from its reserves as part of $2.7 billion in back pay, as dictated by the settlement.
“The most important part about the settlement — and let’s face it, there’s still a lot of work to be done there — is it creates some clarity and some visibility on a whole bunch of issues that have sort of been roiling everybody for a while,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said last week. “The other thing it does is create predictability and stability for schools. It creates a tremendous opportunity for student-athletes.”
Emmert's tenure also highlighted the NCAA's undervaluing of Olympic sports, particularly women's sports. An outside law firm hired by the NCAA found in 2021 that the organization "significantly" undervalued the monetary value of the women's basketball tournament, for instance.
Other than all that, though, the Emmert era -- the second longest presidency in NCAA history -- was a smashing success.
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