Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski was overwhelmingly voted the most powerful person in college basketball in an anonymous survey of coaches a month ago by CBS Sports, and for good reason.
Although there are no active head coaches serving on the Commission on College Basketball, Krzyzewski's fingerprints are all over the committee in other ways.
Former Blue Devil star Grant Hill and retired Gen. Martin Dempsey are two of the 14 members of the group, which was established Wednesday by NCAA president Mark Emmert in the wake of the ongoing FBI investigation into corruption involving apparel companies in college basketball. Basketball Hall of Famer David Robinson, the father of current Duke player Justin Robinson, is also on the committee.
Hill is now a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and Dempsey is the chairman of USA Basketball and a close friend of Krzyzewski for decades since earning his master's degree at Duke in the early 1980s.
According to Emmert's statement Wednesday, the commission's goal is to investigate the relationships between schools or athletes and outside entities like apparel companies or financial advisors, focus on the relationship between the NCAA and the NBA and promote transparency between the NCAA's national office and its member institutions.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will chair the committee, which will convene for the first time in November and make recommendations in April.
"Individuals who break the trust on which college sports is based have no place here. While I believe the vast majority of coaches follow the rules, the culture of silence in college basketball enables bad actors, and we need them out of the game," Emmert said in the statement. "This is not a time for half-measures or incremental change."
Former Duke player Jay Bilas, now one of the NCAA's foremost critics as a college basketball analyst for ESPN, is not on the committee but weighed in on the news on Twitter Wednesday afternoon.
Krzyzewski spent the majority of his preseason press conference last Tuesday discussing the FBI investigation and lamented that there was no group dedicated to finding a solution to the problem.
"Who figures it out? To me, that's the biggest question. There is no who. There is a group called the who, but they don't figure out this particular thing," Krzyzewski said. "We are not running this the way a billion-dollar industry should be run. We try to put a circle into a square."
He will have to hope a couple of his longtime associates can help the NCAA take that initial step forward.
Mitchell Gladstone contributed reporting.
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