Jay Bilas has been saying this for quite some time now, but when the most winningest D-1 men’s basketball coach says it, you have to pay attention. The Charlotte Observer is reporting that Duke’s head coach Mike Krzyzewski believes that college basketball needs a commissioner, somebody whose only focus is on the day to day operations of NCAA basketball.
“Who’s in charge?” Krzyzewski said a day before his team met Louisville in the Elite Eight in late March. “Well, who, though? No, President (Mark) Emmert is in charge of the entire NCAA. He’s got a huge job. There should be somebody in charge of college basketball who does this on a day-to-day basis and understands everything about it.
“When they put the dirt on me, inside, underneath the dirt, I’m still going to be yelling for somebody to run college basketball.”
The commissioner could serve as college basketball’s CEO and be responsible for the day-to-day operation of the sport, a business with revenues approaching $1 billion annually. By streamlining leadership, changes to the game could be made more quickly than with the current committee-driven structure.
Emmert, the NCAA president, has said he is open to dramatic changes in the governance structure and has pledged to review the idea of a commissioner at the organization’s January convention with the goal of having new proposals adopted in April. None of the other NCAA-governed sports have commissioners.
Men’s college basketball generates nearly all of the NCAA’s revenue – the organization projects that 90 percent ($712 million of $797 million) of its 2012-13 revenue will come from the TV broadcast deal with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting alone. Most of the remaining 10 percent will come from ticket and merchandise sales at NCAA championships, with the men’s basketball Final Four the largest contributor.