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On College Basketball

In an Upset, the N.C.A.A. Claims the Moral High Ground

Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, at a news conference Thursday, said he discussed the religious freedom law with Indiana legislators and sought a resolution.Credit...Darron Cummings/Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS — During his annual pre-Final Four news conference on Thursday, the N.C.A.A.’s president, Mark Emmert, reflected on the coincidental confluence of the Final Four being held at Lucas Oil Stadium this weekend and the contentious law passed last week just a few blocks up Capitol Avenue.

The timing, Emmert suggested, was unfortunate.

“Are we happy that this debate is occurring during the middle of Final Four week?” Emmert said during his 45-minute news conference. “Of course not.”

Emmert’s sentiment made sense. The law — which seeks to give individuals freedom to abide by their religious beliefs, but which critics say could allow businesses to discriminate against gay men and lesbians — has diverted attention from what Kirk Schulz, the Kansas State president and chairman of the N.C.A.A. board of governors, called the “great stories to tell about student-athletes at all of our universities.”

Yet the timing could be viewed as fortuitous. Aside from the sports narratives, the main story line concerning the Final Four this week is the law passed by Indiana state legislators and signed by Gov. Mike Pence. The N.C.A.A.’s response has been to express concern, to implicitly threaten to pull future events, and generally to say, as Emmert did Thursday, that the law goes against “fundamental core values of higher education.”

Emmert said that the N.C.A.A., which has its headquarters in Indianapolis, had reached out to legislators about the law.

“I talked to the governor, the speaker of the House, worked with the mayor, with business leaders in town,” Emmert said, adding that he had told them he “wanted this resolved as quickly as possible.”

Such a response seems to jibe with public sentiment, as seen by the Indiana government’s rapid attempt to clarify the law and Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s refusal to sign a similar law in Arkansas. On Thursday evening, Pence signed a law clarifying that the original law did not authorize discrimination.

Because of the law, the N.C.A.A. finds itself occupying a place where its critics rarely see it: the moral high ground.

The N.C.A.A. has seen worse weeks. In the midst of the Final Four last year, the N.C.A.A. was responding to the Connecticut star Shabazz Napier’s account of “hungry nights,” brought on partly by the association’s restrictions on how many meals teams could serve athletes. Soon after, the N.C.A.A. significantly loosened those restrictions.

In the past year, the N.C.A.A. altered its basic structure in a way that favors the most affluent conferences and most valuable sports. The association became a subject on Capitol Hill as some of Northwestern’s football players started a unionization drive. The N.C.A.A. lost a major class-action lawsuit, the so-called Ed O’Bannon case. Court documents revealed that the N.C.A.A. may have bluffed its way into a sanctions agreement with Penn State.

Yet at Thursday’s news conference, eight of the 12 questions at least tangentially concerned the Indiana law.

Only one concerned a recent court filing, related to the academic scandal at North Carolina, in which the N.C.A.A. essentially denied it was responsible for athletes’ education. (Emmert said the N.C.A.A. should only monitor academic eligibility and impermissible academic benefits.)

Just one question concerned the basic feasibility of the student-athlete concept that is central to college sports. (“To be a successful Division I athlete and a successful student is a very demanding task,” Emmert said. “In some cases it’s too demanding.”)

In politics, easy-to-rally-behind social issues frequently crowd out more divisive economic ones, and a similar dynamic could be benefiting the N.C.A.A. right now. The N.C.A.A.’s standing against what some call homophobia — or, from a different vantage point, the N.C.A.A.’s failing to recognize the importance of religious freedom — is a more attention-grabbing topic than whether the extra thousands of dollars that some athletes may receive to cover the so-called full cost of attendance represents sufficient compensation.

Asked about the prospect of higher costs leading to cuts in scholarships in nonrevenue sports or even the elimination of entire such sports, Schulz justified a climate in which football and men’s basketball teams all but mint money, yet swimming teams must fear for their very existences.

“One of the challenges we have in public higher education is that in many states, there’s a disinvestment in higher education,” Schulz said.

In February, Kansas’ governor, Sam Brownback, announced 2 percent cuts in state funding for regents universities, including Kansas State.

But discussing college sports by focusing on what is happening in Indianapolis instead of what is happening in Topeka risks missing the forest for a tree.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Moral High Ground for N.C.A.A.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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