MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. And how is your bracket holding up? If you picked Florida...
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
(Laughter).
MARTIN: ...Virginia or Gonzaga for the men's national title - A, I'm not going to ask - but if you did, I'm sorry for you. Me, I just threw in the towel after the first round, so there you have it.
MARTÍNEZ: And I stopped trying years ago (laughter).
MARTIN: Exactly. Same. Same. But for colleges, athletes and fans, the madness of the NCAA basketball tournament is not confined to March. After years of debate and legal fights, last summer, a judge approved a deal between the NCAA and the major conferences. It set rules for directly paying college athletes, including a salary cap of about $20 million, to start for Division I schools. Now this is the first March Madness being played under the new rules and we wondered how all this was going. So we called the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker.
When we talked about this last year, you were in favor of the settlement because you said it would bring stability and predictability. Do you think it has?
CHARLIE BAKER: Well, I also said that it's going to be probably the third biggest change in college sports. The first being the creation of the NCAA, the second being Title IX, and this being the third biggest. I would have expected it to be a little messy to begin with. When I took this job three years ago, the only people who weren't allowed to talk to student-athletes about NIL were the schools.
MARTIN: NIL being name, image and likeness, which is the way kids...
BAKER: Right.
MARTIN: ...Tend to get paid for their name, image and likeness. Right. OK.
BAKER: The agents could talk to kids. Any third party could talk to them, the collectives could talk to them, the boosters could talk to them, schools could not talk to kids about money, which I thought was bizarre. So the settlement gave schools the ability to do that.
MARTIN: So the president has gotten interested in this. He had a college sports roundtable at the White House earlier this month. You were there. So let me just play a short clip of one of the things he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Federal legislation must allow college athletic programs to set common-sense rules, simple common-sense rules, without endless litigation, and establish a fair name, image and likeness standard that eliminates the patchwork of conflicting state laws.
MARTIN: Two questions about that. Is there generally a consensus in your world, the world of college sports, that there's still a big problem that needs to be fixed? And if that's the case, what are the fixes that are being talked about?
BAKER: Well, let's take the NIL piece that he mentioned. There are somewhere between 35 and 40 state laws around NIL. And they all basically are designed to create advantages for the schools in the state in which that law has been written. And so when he talks about creating a single national standard around NIL, I think what he's talking about is creating one rule that would apply across all 50 states, which I think most schools would say would be a good thing. You know, and I said this to many of the people I've met with in Washington, if you want to give us the ability to write national rules for certain things, and you're nervous about us taking advantage of that in some way, write it for five years. And if we don't do right by it, it goes away in five years. If we do do right by it, then you have the ability to re-up it five years from now.
MARTIN: What is the thing that keeps you up at night, if there's anything that keeps you up at night?
BAKER: I think the thing that probably keeps me up at night, when I got to the NCAA, one of the things people said to me is that the power conferences are going to leave. And so finding a way to keep the family together, as you might call it, across Division I and Division II and Division III, that was important to me because I talked to a lot of kids a lot of the time - they're the best part of the job - and I always say to them, what's the thing about the NCA that means the most to you? And they all say the same thing, which is a chance to play in a national tournament, to test ourselves outside our division, outside our conference, to figure out just how good we really are. And to be part of a national championship, I think, for a lot of kids, is - it's kind of a highlight as college students and student-athletes. And when they do that, I think we should sit back and say, wow, that was pretty cool.
MARTIN: Well, as a parent of student-athletes, I have slightly different concerns (laughter), but I think about - the health and safety of these athletes is the thing that scares me. But I was thinking more about the issue we talked about last year, which is the gambling and the harassment that comes from the gambling. The stalking of female athletes and the harassment directed at male athletes because of the gambling. That was the issue that was on my mind.
BAKER: So we've made a lot of progress on that one. We know so much more than we knew 10 years ago about what it takes to keep kids safe. And most of the data I look at that compares health and well-being of student athletes to the health and well-being of other people in their age group, kids who play sports actually have a support group. They have a whole bunch of things that come with being part of a community on campus that actually gives them some real benefits that a lot of other young people struggle to find in the world of social media.
MARTIN: That's the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker. Mr. President, thanks so much for talking to us once again.
BAKER: It's nice to hear from you, Michel, and I hope you really enjoy March Madness. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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