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Instead of it being a somber occasion, Emmert’s departure is more reminiscent of when Ace Ventura left a monastery<\/a>.<\/p>\n Writing for Sports Illustrated in 2022, Pat Forde wrote<\/a>, “If there is a less respected current CEO of any organization, I don’t know who it is.”<\/p>\n In 2013, USA Today<\/a> detailed a litany of Emmert’s failings before he got the NCAA gig, showing the president’s departure should be celebrated coast to coast.\u00a0<\/p>\n Former USC running back Reggie Bush may throw the biggest party<\/a>, or maybe it will be at the University of Connecticut, where a billion-dollar construction project under his supervision “gradually became a mess, with widespread code violations and tens of millions of dollars in budget overruns.”\u00a0<\/p>\n USA Today also reported that while Emmert was at LSU, the football program under Nick Saban was a mess academically.<\/p>\n Emmert oversaw an investigation made by a university instructor and concluded that the majority of the allegations were “unfounded” while acknowledging “five minor and isolated violations.”<\/p>\n “Emmert even met on LSU’s behalf with the NCAA, which accepted LSU’s findings,” USA Today reported. “But after Emmert decided to leave LSU in 2004, a witness testified in a deposition that [an] instructor was telling the truth and that the problems were far more systemic than the school admitted, even extending to grades being changed for football players, according to court records.”<\/p>\n Emmert was in senior management at Montana State in the 1990s, when the NCAA found the university demonstrated a “lack of institutional control.”<\/p>\n There’s a story to be written about how someone so unspectacular was able to fail upward for so long.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Mandel reminded us, we don’t know what Emmert did during his time as the president of the NCAA, other than line executives’ pocketbooks<\/a>. Emmert defended his record<\/a>, but his 12-year tenure was the worst in the organization’s history.<\/p>\n When it comes to Emmert’s tenure as the most powerful man in the NCAA, we’ll put a twist on an old saying: Don’t be sad that it’s over. Be mad that it ever was.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n