NCAA president Mark Emmert issued a sharp rebuke of esports, indicating that they are not likely to become a formal part of the university athletics program anytime soon.
Major college programs such as Utah, Berkeley, and most recently Marquette have all made varying investments to add esports opportunities. While speaking at the NCAA’s annual convention in Orlando late last week, however, Emmert cited a series of concerns he held about whether his group would formally recognize esports.
“We know a lot of the content is hugely misogynistic,” Emmert said, according to the Associated Press. “We know that some of the content is really violent. We don’t particularly embrace games where the objective is to blow your opponent’s head off. We know there are serious concerns about health and wellness around those games.”
Emmert has previously indicated that the NCAA was “exploring” the possible inclusion of esports. He has been noncommittal about which way he was leaning, saying 13 months ago, “The answer may be ‘Eh, we don’t see a role.’ Or the answer may be ‘Yeah, there’s a really interesting role here.’”
Last week, his tone indicated an interest only if esports would conform to existing NCAA standards.
“We may have an opportunity in front of us to apply our values to esports and better align those games to our values to change not just what happens in our activities but what happens across your campuses and more broadly what happens in society,” Emmert said. “We don’t want to ever change our values to fit a game or some other entity. We want to change that entity to fit our values.”
In launching its varsity esports program last Wednesday, Marquette hailed the potential of esports and recognized their massive appeal to the demographic of college students, noting that 35 percent of North American League of Legends players are full-time college students. Of that cohort, roughly half don’t participate in traditional school sports activities while the majority pursue STEM majors.
“Being named after an explorer means it’s in Marquette’s DNA to define the opportunities of tomorrow and ensure we’re anticipating what future students will expect,” said Marquette president Michael R. Lovell in a statement. “Marquette embraces new methods of teaching and areas of study, and esports and gaming in general have the potential to impact both, while also helping to strengthen our student recruitment prospects in an increasingly competitive environment.”
SportTechie Takeaway
Esports have already made huge inroads towards full adoption by mainstream athletics. The 2019 Asian Games included them as an official sport, and last year the IOC held an exploratory forum that considered esports for the Olympics. Esports are still predominantly male and often graphically violent, but the NCAA’s top cash cow is football, which is almost exclusively male and features real-world violence.
Many have argued that the culture around inclusion of women in esports needs to improve. There are also health and wellness concerns around the long hours of gaming. Through access to athletics staff and coming under the jurisdiction of Title IX rules, wellness and inclusion are areas where the institutionalized infrastructure of an NCAA athletics program could help.