Oliver Luck is the right hire at the right time for overcriticized NCAA
The NCAA might be the easiest punching bag in all of American sports. It’s an institution whose likability rating seems to fall somewhere between that of Roger Goodell and the International Olympic Committee. If you’re looking for an easy target, the NCAA is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.
The laziest opinion-shapers in sports media like to throw out all sorts of character-assassinating critiques about the NCAA – The biggest hypocrites in sports! A money-printing institution that exploits free labor in the name of a faux amateurism ideal! A morally bankrupt cartel! – yet don’t really go beyond a handful of the sexiest headlines for their proof.
Want some proof the NCAA recognizes the validity of some of these criticisms and is moving toward major, substantive and rapid reform? Look no further than this week’s hiring of esteemed West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck. He is a former NFL quarterback and aspiring politician, an attorney and a man who understands the business of sports, a member of the inaugural College Football Playoff selection committee, and -- most important -- a former student-athlete and the father of two former student-athletes, including NFL megastar Andrew Luck.
The message with the hiring of Luck to be the No. 2 to NCAA president Mark Emmert in a newly created position of executive vice president of regulatory affairs?
The NCAA finally understands that as the big-money world of collegiate sports is rapidly changing around it, it must change too – and quickly.
In an introductory conference call with reporters Thursday, Luck emphasized how vital he sees the NCAA in particular and intercollegiate athletics in general to the way we live in modern America. He cited the hundreds of thousands of student-athletes whose lives have been enhanced by athletic scholarships. He spoke passionately about not just the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball but the 21 other sports under the NCAA umbrella. He referred to the unwieldy nature of such a large bureaucracy, with nearly 1,300 member institutions and nearly 500,000 current student-athletes, and the importance of building confidence and trust among that diverse group.
Most of all, he came across as a true believer in the amateurism model, someone who recognizes the massive flaws in the organization’s current state but who believes whole-heartedly in the century-old organization's core mission.
“I have an enormous positive belief in the value of intercollegiate athletics,” Luck said Thursday. “It’s a great institution that has helped hundreds of thousands of young men and women get through college. Certainly an institution as big as this has some warts. But I believe it’s a great institution that’s helped lots of people, and I believe it’s absolutely something worth fighting for.”
The low-hanging fruit that’s portrayed as an often-inept NCAA? That easy punching bag? Sure, the perception is out there, and it’s out there for a reason. Luck has no pretensions about that. The biggest criticism against the NCAA these days is the issue of high-profile student-athletes being able to own their own name, image and likeness. The antitrust class-action suit that began as a question of whether college athletes have the right to make money off their likeness has morphed into a public trial about the ideal of amateurism. It’s a silly argument for the NCAA to stake so much on in recent years -- Who cares if Johnny Manziel is signing autographs for cash? Why shouldn’t a player get a cut of the buckets of money he generates for a university? -- and it seems like an argument Luck will bring a breath of fresh air to.
There are also the issues of how the NCAA has handled concussions, how the NCAA’s enforcement has appeared uneven, how the NCAA has bungled investigations like the recent one involving the University of Miami, how the NCAA may have overreached in its punishment of Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, how the NCAA doesn’t allow basketball players to test the waters of the NBA Draft then return to the college ranks . . . the list could go on.
Look, any national organization this big and this diverse is going to have issues. The concerns of reigning Division I football champion Florida State are in a different universe from the concerns of reigning Division III football champion Wisconsin-Whitewater. And any organization whose existence is based on a sporting model unique to America -- students in institutions of higher education play sports to pay for their educations, but then some of those sports generate billions of dollars for those institutions -- is going to have loud, intractable critics.
What I take from the NCAA hiring Oliver Luck is this is an organization that still believes in in its amateurism ideal but realizes the organization must undergo drastic -- and rapid -- change. Luck is a strong, campus voice who understands the frustrations schools have had with the NCAA. That’s a way of thinking much needed at the NCAA offices in Indianapolis. He understands what schools are yearning for from the NCAA in terms of enforcement: “clear rules, an expedient process, even-handed enforcement and a timeliness to all that,” he said.
He’s someone from one of the 65 schools in the Power 5 conferences that, starting next month, receive more autonomy -- which will help their flexibility on historically inflexible amateurism rules. On Thursday he referred to the upcoming governance changes as something that’s much better than the “unwieldy” system of the past. He’s also someone who has been outspoken about how a student-athlete should control his or her name, image or likeness. In the past he’s referred to that as a “constitutional right,” though on Thursday he changed his wording a bit, calling it a “fundamental right.”
“The next 36-to-48 months is really a seminal period for the NCAA,” Luck said Thursday.
He’s right.
And as long as we’re not going to follow the suggestions of those who’d rather use the NCAA as a constant punching bag -- critics whose solution to solve the big, important, nuanced problems of college sports seems to be to just put a stick of dynamite under the NCAA and blow up that ideal of amateurism -- Luck is also the right man for this job.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
