The right man for the job

 So the NCAA has chosen its next president, and everything about him speaks precisely to everything college athletics are in 2022. In other words, Charlie Baker, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and the new big cheese at the NCAA, is the right man at the right time for the right job.

Consider:

* Baker, who played basketball at Harvard, is a former healthcare CEO and was a business-oriented Republican governor from the old school.

* He has no background in either sports administration or academia.

* He does, however, know his way around a corporate boardroom.

How is this not perfect fit for the corporate monolith that is Football Inc. -- the engine that drives the whole multibillion-dollar business, and thus the only college athletics that seem to matter any more?

You don't need a man with academic administrative experience to run that sort of outfit, because what do academics have to do with it? They still call 'em "student-athletes," but mostly they're free agents on the make for the best deal, same as their multimillionaire coaches. If their value as students and not just athletes still mattered, and if education were therefore still even a fig leaf in the equation, those coaches wouldn't  be pulling down $9 or $10 million a year.

Nope. They'd be making a salary commensurate with any other tenured faculty, and they'd be teaching American history at 1 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday before heading out to practice.

But it's not that world anymore. And that's why Baker is such a cozy fit. 

As a former CEO he knows how to run a company, and knows how to forge partnerships that benefit that company. He speaks the language of the deal fluently, and the NCAA is about nothing if not deals: TV deals, sponsorship deals, mergers and acquisitions, the whole ball of yarn.

In March, after all, he'll assume leadership of an organization whose member schools no longer care about anything outside the business ledger. The Big Ten adds Rutgers and Maryland to tap into the East Coast TV money; then it decides to steal UCLA and USC from the Pac-12 to tap into the L.A. TV market. The SEC swipes Texas and Oklahoma. The ACC filches Notre Dame -- with the caveat that the Irish can still call itself a football independent despite playing half its games against ACC opponents.

It's all utterly absurd to anyone with a sense of or appreciation for history, which has always been what lifted college athletics above the soulless NFL or NBA. USC and UCLA were never meant to play conference games against Ohio State or Michigan; they were meant to play each other on New Year's Day, in the Rose Bowl.

And Texas and Alabama?

The Cotton Bowl, not some November clash in Tuscaloosa.

Notre Dame and Clemson?

Orange Bowl.

Georgia-Oklahoma?

Sugar Bowl.

On and on. And, yes, this is indeed Get Off My Lawn Guy shaking his bony fist at clouds and  the modern age. Times change, surprise, surprise. A CEO who never taught a class, chaired a department or had any association with sports after college except watch them on TV is about to head the main governing body of college athletics. And it makes perfect sense. 

History?

Aw, hell. If you can't eat it or fatten accounts receivable with it, what good is it?

I think I need to go lie down.