NCAA just threatened California. It isn't going to work.

Ten years ago this summer, former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a lawsuit against the NCAA over the use of his name and likeness in a video game. Soon after, Mark Emmert became president of the NCAA, and it’s kind of mind-blowing how, a decade later, he’s still raging against a future that seems entirely inevitable.   

This week, Emmert -- who’s really grown into his role as the most boring supervillain in sports -- managed to threaten the entire of state of California, whose legislature is considering SB 206, which would allow college athletes to make money off their names, images and likenesses as of 2023. California, as is its nature, is trying to push the NCAA to do what it may not do on its own, even as the NCAA has formed a so-called “working group” to consider whether athletes should, you know, be able to profit off their own celebrity. It’s an incremental step that wouldn’t actually even touch the bigger and far more complex idea of paying players, but Emmert apparently even views this as a threat to his fiefdom. 

So if you pass this bill, Emmert told California this week, maybe we’ll just ban all California schools from NCAA championships. 

Or, as Emmert put it, in classically dull Emmert-ese: “When contrasted with current NCAA rules, as drafted the bill threatens to alter materially the principles of intercollegiate athletics and create local differences that would make it impossible to host fair national championships. As a result, it likely would have a negative impact on the exact student-athletes it intends to assist.”    

All this jargon makes up what’s almost certainly an empty threat. You really think the NCAA would just exclude California teams from, say, its NCAA basketball tournaments? It reminds me of the time Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney threatened to drop the conference down to Division III if college athletes started getting a share of the NCAA’s massive television revenue. 

And yet these threats keep coming, 10 years after O’Bannon’s lawsuit, because it’s the only thing the NCAA can do to stem the tide of change, and to try to tamp down the tide of public opinion against it. Emmert and the NCAA are so dug in on these antiquated ideas that it feels like they can’t possibly let go. 

Has there ever been a head of a major sporting organization who draws more vitriol than Emmert? It’s hard to think of one. This week, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post laid in to Emmert, which is pretty easy to do these days. I guess I’m in the midst of doing it myself, though I’ll also admit that some of this is not entirely Emmert’s fault. He just happened to ascend to the position at a moment of tremendous change, in an era when public skepticism of college sports’ traditional business model -- make tons of money and distribute very little of that money to the athletes themselves -- seems more hypocritical than ever. 

But a lot of this is Emmert’s fault. Because nothing he ever does seems engineered to account for that change in public opinion. He just stonewalls and threatens.  And maybe he’s merely reflecting the opinion of the administrators of the various schools that make up the NCAA. But this is why California is right to push this law on its own, and this is why the state shouldn’t back down no matter what Emmert says. 

The only way the NCAA is going to change its ways is if it's pushed to do it. It's not going to follow through on its threats, which means maybe it will finally be forced to change its approach.  And maybe that push will be enough to nudge Mark Emmert out the door. Because if that happens, and if the NCAA chooses a progressive-minded president who’s more willing to look realistically at the future, maybe we can finally have a real, adult conversation about the future of college sports.