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The following is the full transcript of an interview with NCAA President Charlie Baker, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 5, 2026. This interview was taped on July 1, 2025.

Updated on: July 5, 2026 / 10:37 AM EDT / CBS News

ED O'KEEFE: Charlie Baker, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. You know, college athletics has changed dramatically in just a few years, with athletes now able to earn money and schools directly sharing revenue. Earlier this year, you said the NCAA is in the middle of its biggest transformation in decades. What did you mean by that?

CHARLIE BAKER: Well, if you think about the 100 years plus of the NCAA, the three biggest things that have happened, in my view, were the creation of it, almost a little over 100 years ago, the Title IX, which completely changed the playing field with respect to women's sports, and this, which was the first time you could have actual revenue sharing beyond sort of scholarship support and other kinds of academic support, and that sort of thing, for student athletes. And- and I say to people all the time that you can't go through a change that's this big and not expect a lot of bumps along the way, and we certainly have plenty of those, but as the first person who actually made a proposal around school-based revenue sharing shortly after I got this job back in 2023 I think it's a good thing. Is it messy? Yes. Could it have been less messy? Maybe. But when you go through something like this on this kind of scale, where you're talking about a billion dollars potentially going out to student athletes every year, it's going to be challenging, and as a result, it has been.

ED O'KEEFE: Now, sports, and particularly college sports, as you've mentioned here, are becoming so lucrative and the subject of such great controversy and conversation that Congress has now stepped in, as you know. You're supportive of the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, because it establishes national standards on the name, image, and likeness program for student athletes, because it limits player transfers and makes other changes that are designed to be equitable, at least in the legislation across college athletics, but you know several of the largest athletic conferences take issue with this legislation. So as Washington continues debating it, why do you think it's necessary? Why do you think it's worth passing?

CHARLIE BAKER: Well, first of all, I want to say how much I appreciate the work that Senators Cantwell and Cruz and their colleagues have done on this. I mean, you can tell just by looking at the legislation where they both gave up big things that mattered to them in pursuit of something that was a bill that could be supported by both sides. In this day and age, honestly, you know, having spent a bunch of my career in public life, I know how hard that, how hard that is to do, and I appreciate it. But if you were to say to me, you know, is the eligibility system that we currently have working? I mean, if everybody would comply with it and stay out of the courts, maybe, but they don't. There is no agent regular regulation, which is a huge problem. You talk to any student athlete about that, and any school about it, they'll tell you that. This provides some regulatory structure around agents. It also deals with all the state preemption issues. We, you know, you got 40 different states with 40 different rules around how NIL should work, which makes it virtually impossible to set a national standard. You also have the elements associated with dealing with how we're going to handle some of the issues around NIL, which you mentioned. And again, you know, for all of this, what we're really trying to achieve is some sort of national framework so that you can have national championships and national competitions, in which, for all intents and purposes, everybody's playing by the same set of rules. Now, I understand some of the concerns that the Big 10 and the SEC, in particular, have raised with the bill. We have some concerns with the bill too. But to simply walk away from something that deals with a number of the most significant challenges that face college sports at that point in time, in my view, would be a mistake, and I spent time talking to folks in all of the power conferences, and the rest of Division I, and Division II, and Division III about this, and my message to them has been, look, these folks crafted a bipartisan bill, really hard to do, does everybody love everything about it? No. Is the process associated with crafting it done? Also, no. So, let's take seriously this opportunity to support the process, support the effort, support the parts of the bill that we believe in. And then continue to try and work with folks in the Senate, and hopefully ultimately folks in the House to create something that we can all get behind.