Staples: At a time when the NCAA needed a visionary leader, it hired Mark

In 2009, a cadre of plaintiff’s attorneys led by Michael Hausfeld sued the NCAA on antitrust grounds on behalf of former UCLA basketball Ed O’Bannon and an as-yet-determined class.

Hausfeld had represented native Alaskans against Texaco after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He had represented a class of Holocaust victims against a Swiss bank that held their money for the Nazis who had stolen it. Clashing with him would require a visionary NCAA leader capable of imagination, flexibility and a willingness to push the NCAA’s membership to make meaningful changes lest a wave of common sense get the NCAA laughed out of multiple courthouses and into regulatory purgatory.

Instead, the NCAA hired Mark Emmert.

In November 2010, Emmert took over as president of college sports’ governing body following tenures as the CEO at the University of Washington and LSU. The NCAA announced Tuesday that at some point between now and June 2023, Emmert will leave the office having presided over the near-complete dismantling of the organization and its once-unquestioned power. Whether that would have happened with or without him is a perfectly legitimate question. The world changed. The structure of the NCAA wasn’t designed to adapt quickly — to anything.

But Emmert cashed the (exceedingly large) checks. So he gets to wear the failure.

In a way, that was the entire point. Emmert was paid handsomely — as much as $2.9 million a year — to act as a heat shield for a bunch of university presidents who were either too greedy, too scared or too disinterested to adapt to a changing landscape and adjust the organization accordingly. At times, Emmert’s 12-year tenure felt like the 11-year period when the old World Wrestling Federation held out Canadian promoter Jack Tunney as the organization’s “president.” On TV, Tunney looked very official, and he made statements on all the major (fictional) events that affected the organization. Nine-year-old me didn’t understand that Vince McMahon was really in charge, so I yelled at the screen if Tunney handed down a decision that negatively affected Hulk Hogan or the Junkyard Dog or any of my other favorite wrestlers. Especially in the later years of his tenure, Emmert felt like that kind of figurehead. The CEOs at Georgetown or Wisconsin or Georgia or Oregon State were making — or not making — the decisions. Emmert felt as if he was just there for all of us to yell at.

Emmert did try to exercise power at first. In fact, one of his first major acts suggested he was keenly aware of the iceberg ahead. Less than a year into his tenure, Emmert held a retreat that included various university CEOs. During this retreat, Emmert pushed the idea that schools should be allowed to provide up to a $2,000-a-year stipend as part of athletic scholarships to help those scholarships get closer to the actual cost of attendance figure that the schools submitted to the federal government each year. He also voiced support for then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s idea to allow schools to offer four-year athletic scholarships instead of one-year, renewable ones.

“There’s a strong appetite … to find ways that allow us to be…