{"id":701124,"date":"2026-06-13T05:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T05:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/701124\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T05:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T05:18:13","slug":"charlie-baker-questions-about-ncaas-power-worth-asking-as-judges-ignore-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/701124\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Baker: Questions about NCAA’s power ‘worth asking’ as judges ‘ignore the rules’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following the ruling in Texas Tech<\/a> quarterback Brendan Sorsby\u2019s<\/a> eligibility lawsuit this week, NCAA president Charlie Baker called it a \u201cnew low<\/a>\u201d while speaking at NACDA. He reiterated that Thursday and acknowledged questions about the association\u2019s power amid the number of legal challenges.<\/p>\n

During an appearance on ESPN Radio, Baker said if judges \u201cignore the rules,\u201d he understands the questions about how much authority the NCAA has. Those have gotten louder after a judge granted Sorsby an injunction after he admitted to placing thousands of wagers, including on games involving Indiana<\/a> football while on the Hoosiers\u2019 roster. He later entered treatment for gambling addiction.<\/p>\n

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Sorsby\u2019s case is among the list of suits facing the NCAA, and the association has won a number of them at the federal level. But athletes have had the upper hand in local courts, and Baker said decisions have an impact across the landscape, even if it\u2019s a comparatively small number of cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as you have judges who are willing to sort of ignore the rules \u2013 and the law, in some respects\u00a0\u2013 on a number of these issues, and you have people that are willing to go to court over it, it\u2019s a question that\u2019s worth asking,\u201d Baker said on Amber & Ian<\/a>. \u201cI will say, on the eligibility stuff, which we\u2019ve been dealing with all year\u00a0\u2013 and I think we have a better eligibility policy that we\u2019re going to try and put in place, although the one we had has been good for almost 100 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bigger question is not so much the individual cases because at the end of the day, the individual cases are sort of few and far between. It\u2019s the impact it has on \u2013 most organizations, including this one, there\u2019s the hard rules and then there\u2019s the soft rules. The hard rules are the ones the membership \u2026 votes on and puts in place. And then, the soft rules are sort of the modes of behavior associated with those rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlie Baker: \u2018It just destabilizes a lot\u2019<\/p>\n

While Charlie Baker said the majority of NCAA schools stick to the rulebook \u2013 and noted they\u2019re the ones who vote on rules\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the legal challenges send a mixed message to membership. If some schools chose to fight the rules in place, he argued it creates uncertainty for those who follow them. As a result, questions mount about how stable the landscape is.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we\u2019re in a situation like the one we\u2019re in now where, even though the membership votes on the rules and the vast majority of the membership abides by those rules, the fact that some people will go to the court \u2013 and in some cases, to what I would describe as \u2018friendly courts\u2019 \u2013 to chase a decision that gets them out from under a rule, it just destabilizes a lot,\u201d Baker said. \u201cBecause it says to the people who play by the rules, you\u2019re being held to a different standard than the people who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat, I think in some ways, is the bigger issue and the bigger problem because the vast majority of the membership still does comply with the rules. But you chip away at them long enough and there are certainly consequences to that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following the ruling in Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby\u2019s eligibility lawsuit this week, NCAA president Charlie Baker called…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":701125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-701124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/701125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}