"Why does the NCAA exist?"
To preserve its status quo, at all costs. It's been totally corrupted by TV money, and is now apparently driven by a faction of renegade schools and college presidents who cannot get enough money to fund their wildly extravagant and out-of-control arms race to attract the best athletes, so they can make even more money. It's a vicious cycle that these university presidents put into motion back in the late 1980's when they took over control of the NCAA from the athletic directors. To get more money you break your own rules. Then, pretty soon the rules don't mean much of anything anymore.
Unfortunately, the "student-athletes" have been the ones who have suffered because of it. I knew a player on the baseball team at a major D-I NCAA university. He quit the team because he was only getting something like a 1/4 scholarship, yet it was expected that he would spend most of his time practicing with the team. He finally got tired of never having sufficient time to study, do his laundry, eat and do all the other things most people take for granted, called having a life. And baseball is not a revenue-producing sport.
HBO's current RealSports show interviewed a bunch of athletes, mostly in lesser sports at NCAA member institutions, who had a wide variety of complaints about the entire system. They were expected to spend countless hours practicing, were threatened with scholarship revocation on an annual basis if they didn't measure up performance-wise, and one girl became suicidal and actually attempted suicide. She was on the track team at Temple, throwing the discus. Really? They put that much pressure on a lower echelon, non-revenue producing sport athlete? If even half of her story is true it's deplorable.
The team athletes are only supposed to spend 25 hours per week on "team activities." The way some schools account for team activities is rather curious. One example cited was a team from Washington that travelled by bus for 3 1/2 hours each way to play a school in Oregon, plus their practice time prior to the game, meals, hotel stay, etc., etc., etc. The school reported they spent less than five hours on "team activities" for that entire trip. The problem is the NCAA doesn't define what constitutes a "team activity," so the schools get to make stuff up as they go along. I'd say it doesn't include travel, since we've got kids jetting cross country to play conference games nowadays.
Mark Emmert was a shady-dealing crook when he was at UCONN and he still is. He probably cost the taxpayers of Conn. millions, if not billions of dollars wasted on various construction projects at UCONN while he was chancellor. I always laugh just thinking about how quickly he left the podium after handing the 2014 men's NC trophy to Kevin Ollie. A lightning bolt wouldn't have gotten off that stage any faster.
How someone with as little character as this guy possesses ended up in charge of the NCAA is mystifying. Then again, maybe it's not. Maybe maintaining the status quo requires a gutter rat's mentality.
