NCAA Wants To Rewrite Its Constitution After Controversies

The NCAA, with its authority curbed by the Supreme Court, its conferences jostling for influence and its future deeply uncertain, announced Friday, July 30, that it would look to rewrite its constitution.

The decision by the NCAA’s Board of Governors to call what it described as a “special constitutional convention” by November 15 could prove a spark for a sweeping overhaul to the management of college sports. But the association has a long record of slogging toward changes, and it is far from clear that any redesign of the NCAA will satisfy its critics within the multibillion-dollar industry or, just as crucially, the courts and lawmakers that have been scrutinizing it.

The NCAA’s announcement came 15 days after its president, Mark Emmert, began to call publicly for a reorganization of the largest governing body for college sports in the United States, and just more than a month after a unanimous Supreme Court ruling made the association more vulnerable to antitrust litigation.

“I think it’s really the shifting legal environment, the economic environment, the political environment that creates this opportunity in a lot of ways to stop, erase the blackboard and draw a new chart again,” Emmert told reporters during a conference call on Friday. “That’s a really, really powerful opportunity.”

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