Q&A With Mark Emmert, N.C.A.A. President In the 20 months since he took over as he took over as president of the N.C.A.A., Mark Emmert has dealt with scandals, witnessed realignmen, and been held powerless as the conferences negotiated their own lucrative TV deals and now work to decide how to decide a national champion in college football. All while publicly lauding an ideal that is outdated for some, a truism for others: the student-athlete. Now, the N.C.A.A. has introduced new academic reforms with more stringent eligibility requirements which are set to begin in 2016. But, first, high schools across the country need to understand the new guidelines, and Emmert has already been simplifying the N.C.A.A."s arcane rulebook, planning to release a new one this year. Last week, there was talk that Emmert could be interested in returning to Louisiana State, where he once was chancellor. He vehemently denied that; presumably, he has work left to do with the N.C.A.A. On Monday in Manhattan, he talked about the challenges facing college sports. You had a busy first year as president of the N.C.A.A. What kind of change is coming in your second year? We started last August, so about nine months ago, on a very aggressive agenda for change coming out of the presidential retreat focused on, really, two broad areas: one being making sure student-athletes are, in fact, students and serious students, and having the kind of success that they need to have; and secondly, to try and restore and re-build the integrity of intercollegiate athletes. Because, if you remember, last year we had a whole stint of large scale, highly visible scandals. Subdivided those down into a whole bunch of areas dealing with the academic success of student-athletes and holding both the students and the teams accountable, and that's been very successful so far and we're having great impact already there. I'm very, very pleased with what's happened on that front. The other issue of broad integrity and the way we handle our investigations and the adjudication of them is a big, complicated set of tasks. But in our August board meeting we will pass - I'm pretty sure the board will pass - a new set of penalty structures, a new model for adjudicating all of our infractions cases, and then, in the fall or no later than the winter, I hope, we'll have a completely new rule book in place. So those things, in a course of a 12- to 18-month time frame will really change the landscape of college sport. Concerning your immediate future, there have been reports linking you and a return to L.S.U. That's nonsense. I don't know where that came from. Did you consider it at all? I haven't talked to anybody at L.S.U. I don't even know if L.S.U. has a search underway. It's not something that's even been a consideration. With the rush to realignment, loss of rivalries and billion-dollar TV deals, and the scandal and corruption in the past year, are college sports losing their soul a bit? There's an interesting irony going on right now, that if you pause and look at the success of college athletics, it's never been greater, in terms of the graduation rates of student-athletes, their success and persistence in the classroom, the level of participation by student-athletes around the country, the popularity of the games in terms of audiences and obviously the media attention given to college sports. So, all of the things that are the core of what intercollegiate athletics are about are performing extremely well. At the same time, you've got a handful - and by that I mean 20 or 30 - universities whose football and men's basketball programs, only two sports, are able to drive very large amounts of revenue that support all of the rest of their athletic programs, that support a wide variety of activities at those universities. And they're the ones, the schools, that get the largest amount of attention. So people look at that and say, "That's the world of intercollegiate athletics." Again, you know our ads, we've got 430,000 student-athletes out there that are being wildly successful as young men and young women, and as students, but as athletes the attention shifts to a very small number of basketball players and a small number of football players. And I think, as much as anything, there's a skewing of what people are seeing and what they're paying attention to that doesn't represent the broad intercollegiate athletics at all. I think the heart and soul of intercollegiate athletics is actually doing very, very well. Are there problems we need to address? Are there people who misbehave and whose behavior we can't tolerate? Is there a need to increase graduation in a number of programs around the country? You bet. But those are all things we are dealing with. I feel pretty good about where we are right now, and I'm going to feel really good about where we're going to be in the near future. The academic reform that's coming in 2016, the introduction of "academic red shirting," why did those changes need to come about? The board set a very simple standard, and that was that every team and the players on every team ought to be on track for at least, at a bar minimum, a 50 percent graduation rate. But that's not too onerous of a hurdle for any team to meet, especially if they're going to participate in our championships. So that led to, first of all, the setting of the Academic Progress Rate, the A.P.R., at a 930, because we know that over time that produces a 50 percent graduation rate. And then the establishment of the 930 as a minimum qualification for postseason play, put that in place. That'll take effect starting next year. We're going to phase it in; it's 900, and then 900 the next year, then jump to 930 the following year. So that's having a very meaningful impact on all of this. And then we also went back and looked at the students that weren't being successful, if you looked at the lowest quartile, really even the lowest 20 percent of those kids" performances academically, what was the biggest challenge? Well, the biggest challenge was they weren't showing up prepared. They didn't have the academic skills necessary to be successful. So we increased the grade point average requirement in the core courses, knowing that that has a big impact on academic success, and we also pushed the requirements for the core courses down into the junior year of high school so that kids would start thinking about their high school preparation earlier, rather than just try to jam it all in their senior year. Knowing again, from good research, that that increases the chances of a kid being successful. So starting in 2016, someone who meets the current standards that are in place right now, they can still get an athletic scholarship, they can still be part of the team, but they can't participate in competitions. If you hit that threshold, then you can participate immediately. If you don't hit that threshold, then you have to become academically eligible at that university and then move forward. So, at that point, it will be the university's judgment call if they're ready or not. Did you look at the high school system and decide to try and fix it? Well, we know that it's a national issue, right? That our high schools, in many cases, aren't doing the job that these young men and women need them to do. We all see that. Our job, of course, isn't to fix high schools, that's for the Department of Education and states to worry about. But what we do know is, the demands of being a student-athlete are extremely high. And our business is about having students be athletes, so if we're serious about them being students, we have to make sure they show up at the doors of our universities and colleges ready to take on the challenge of being a college student and a Division I athlete. That's a huge demand to place on someone. So we're saying to them early, "You need to get ready for that transition you're about to make." I'm hopeful that over the next four years, as we get high schools and counselors and teachers and high school coaches and A.A.U. coaches and parents and kids to understand what they're going to have to achieve by the time they graduate from high school that this will stimulate the kind of academic behavior that we'd all like to see. If that has a positive impact on high schools, then that would be great. But that's a side benefit. Do you worry that there's a point - with the big money being made by football and men's basketball - where it's too close to being professional, and it's smearing the line between professional and student-athlete? Well, there's a lot of discussion and debate about that right now, but I think the line is quite clear: a student-athlete is somebody who is a full-time student who is succeeding academically and that they're at the university primarily for an educational purpose. That there's some very, very small portion of them who can go make a living in their sport, whatever that may be, whether they do it for a career or they do it for a year or two, and they may pursue that. And that's great. While they're with us, we want and have to insist that they're serious students. They're not playing sport at college for their vocation; they're doing that in preparation for the rest of their life. And it's only in those handful of cases where someone has a real chance to go play in the N.B.A., let's say, where people are saying, "Well, they ought to be compensated." Well, they're provided with their best opportunity in their life to get ready for their professional career. There's no journalism program that provides the kind of professional skill development for a career in journalism that a basketball player gets playing at one of our great colleges, and then moving onto the N.B.A. It's an extraordinary experience for them. So if they want to be a professional athlete, this is clearly the best route to becoming a professional athlete. So the rewards, in either case, are remarkable for the student. As far as the power the conferences have, with their own lucrative TV deals, do you worry the conferences may someday have too much power, leading to a splintering of the N.C.A.A.? Well I don't worry about a splintering of the N.C.A.A. If schools or a conference wanted to create their own association and take on that role, that'd be fine. But those are their decisions, of course. As long as the association serves the interests of all 1,100 members, because we have 1,100 colleges and universities, and they're getting access to a tournament system that they like. The 89 tournaments and everybody seems happy with the men's basketball tournament, for example. As long as the regulatory functions and the enforcement functions work well and fairly, then people are happy with the N.C.A.A. The issue of conferences and media rights that I worry about is, I don't want athletic conferences to simply be aggregators of media rights. They have a greater responsibility than just that. They also have to support and develop the collegiate model of athletics as it exists inside their conference. And they've got to worry about how they schedule games and how that fits in with the lives of their student-athletes. They have to worry about how they support all of the institutions financially, to make sure there's competitive fairness across all the schools inside the conference. They have to worry about how they promote behavior consistent with the rules of the association and collegiate athletics. We need them to not just see themselves as people who aggregate media rights. That's not their job. What's best for the N.C.A.A. regarding a college football playoff system? What's best for the student-athletes? I'm fairly sure that the bowls will continue because they're very successful for communities and conferences and athletes love to play in them and alumni love to go to the games. I'm sure that, regardless of what the B.C.S. does, the Rose Bowl will be played. Laughter. I'm not doubting that. And the Orange Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl. Those bowls will continue. The notion of whether you have a playoff model or not is the big debate. It certainly appears to me that the movement to a four-team playoff made some great momentum and we'll see where they actually wind up. There's still a lot of decisions, obviously, to be made about who those four teams are, how they're selected, and where they play, and whether they're affiliated with bowls and how everything gets distributed. All those details are still undecided and that's going to be the challenging part.