NCAA President Charlie Baker was one of better than 41,000 people on hand Saturday as a new HBCU football champion was crowned.
In an exclusive interview with HBCU Gameday, Baker told Tolly Carr he made it a point to be at the game in which SWAC Champion Florida A&M defeated MEAC Champion 30-26.
“I made a commitment when I was talking to the conferences that I wanted to come to this game,” Baker told Carr. “I also wanted to go to some other games beforehand and family stuff and other things got in the way. So I’m very glad to be here. I’m also going to go to the basketball tournament, which I’m really looking forward to as well. But I think for me, this is a chance to just see some of the most storied and prestigious institutions in the country go for it.”
The Celebration Bowl comes near the end of his first calendar year as president of the largest athletic association in college athletics.
“You could call it exciting. I might call it more like turbulent, but I certainly I expected anticipated that this was going to be a challenging time for college sports,” Baker said. “And as a former college athlete married to a former college athlete with two college athletes who are who are children and another college athlete is my brother and lots of friends, I thought it was an important time to be willing to step into this role.”
Charlie Baker talked about the impact that the commissioners of the four NCAA HBCU conferences – the CIAA, MEAC, SIAC and SWAC – have had by going to speak to Congress in recent months.
“(CIAA Commissioner) Jacqie McWilliams and I have talked quite a bit about this, and I personally believe that the HBCUs have as much influence or more as virtually anybody else who goes down there and talks to people. Their voices really matter,” Baker said. “I could feel a change in some of the conversations I was having with people in the House and the Senate after the HBCU use paid visits down there, and I guess it’s up there from here. It’s down from Massachusetts to Washington. They’re really important and they matter. And they should be important and they should matter.”
Baker mentioned several ways he thinks the NCAA can assist HBCUs specifically, including helping expand their fan bases and helping with the costs of running an athletics department.
“We’ve never really tried to create a purchasing collaborative as a as an organization, and yet we have 1100 members,” Baker noted. “They buy a ton of the same stuff. We can save everybody ten, 15, 20 percent of what they pay for all the product that they buy to support their programs. It’s real money that they could turn around and reinvest in other things.”
Check out the full interview on our YouTube channel.