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NCAA President Mark Emmert Under Fire

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NCAA president Mark Emmert finds himself under fire from top athletic administrators, organization staffers and others as he approaches his third year on the job.

ESPN investigative reporters Mike Fish and Dana O’Neil detail Emmert’s stormy tenure at the helm of the organization in the article, “NCAA’s Emmert at crossroads.”

They write: “The Penn State announcement was supposed to be the defining moment of Emmert’s tenure. But instead of signifying his and the organization’s status as tough on NCAA crime, it has become Emmert’s Waterloo moment. Since that announcement, his leadership style, combative personality, and most of all, his decisions, have directly intersected with an NCAA in deep crisis. Employees are headed for the exits in droves, and instead of helping to alleviate the NCAA’s problems, the man at the top may be compounding them.”

NCAA President Mark Emmert

The Executive Committee, a board made up of university and conference administrators that acts as the NCAA’s highest governance body, is scheduled to meet Aug. 1. They are standing behind Emmert remaining at the helm. In 60-plus years of the NCAA, Mark Emmert is only its fifth president.

However, in recent days, SEC commissioner Mike Slive, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby and ACC commissioner John Swofford have been publicly and loudly calling for change in the organization and questioning “NCAA leadership.”
In an “Outside the Lines” interview last week at the NCAA’s headquarters in Indianapolis, the embattled Emmert is described as cocksure and feisty.

When asked if he would have done anything differently in the Penn State case or on any other decision, Emmert, 59, said there was nothing.

The ESPN article goes on to report that he has been accused of pandering in search of public relations approval; using his position to entertain his guests at events at the expense of NCAA staff; disenfranchising leaders in college athletics and his own employees; engaging in public wars of words with the media; misreading his own membership by attempting to fast-track a new rule to provide some student-athletes a $2,000 stipend; and mishandling two of the highest-profile NCAA cases in history — the drawn-out, bungled University of Miami investigation, and the Penn State case.

To read more about Emmert’s leadership of the NCAA, go here for the full story.

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