With the passage of the House v. NCAA settlement in June, the NCAA is preparing to dramatically change its structure. In a wide-ranging conversation with CBS Sports, NCAA president Charlie Baker opened up on the numerous changes, and where the organization fits into the landscape long term.
In the months since the settlement, the College Sports Commission was created to handle many of the issues of player compensation. Additionally, the organization is reducing committees from 44 to 30, with increased representation from athletes.
“This is all making it possible for us to make decisions,” Baker told CBS Sports. “A huge part of the reason what we’ve been doing the last few years feels so rushed is because we went years without dealing with and solving a lot of these issues to try and bring the NCAA into the 21st century. I think where we’ve landed on this is going to give us a committee structure that’s going to be able to make decisions and represent the membership.”
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The creation of the College Sports Commission will allow college sports to separate their governance structures on specific issues. The CSC will handle the “money stuff,” as Baker puts it: Cap management, third-party NIL and arbitration. The NCAA will no longer play any role in enforcing player compensation.
However, that will allow the NCAA to continue focusing on its bread-and-butter issues. The NCAA will still handle all issues of competition, including rules, eligibility and enforcing rules against sports betting. The hope is that having organizations that focus more specifically on key issues will allow each to be more transparent and do their jobs better. And more importantly, the NCAA hopes the system will hold up even better to scrutiny with the protection of the settlement.
“People are going to know more about what’s going on than they have before,” Baker said. “Since [the settlement] sits inside an injunction, there’s actually a federal commitment to it that hasn’t existed before. And finally that arbitration process to resolve disputes, hopefully will reduce some of the litigation that has dominated the past few years.”
The NCAA paid $2.8 billion to former athletes to settle the House v. NCAA class action lawsuit. The settlement paved the way for athletes to receive direct payments in the form of revenue-sharing. During the 2025-26 school year, athletes across all sports can receive up to $20.5 million from their respective schools. The vast majority of Power Four schools have committed to fully funding that number.
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