NEW YORK -- NCAA president Mark Emmert said information revealed in federal college basketball corruption trials will be useful in current or future investigations of universities, but that those probes likely won't be completed by the end of the 2018-19 season.
Emmert noted that the NCAA only can use information revealed at trial and must remain respectful of any ongoing investigations.
"This whole incident has cast a very bad light on college basketball, and we need to deal with it as effectively as we can," Emmert told reporters Wednesday after speaking at the Learfield Intercollegiate Athletics Forum. "We're not going to have everything wrapped up by the Final Four, that's for sure, because these trials are still going to be going on."
He declined to comment on any ongoing investigations.
Emmert said the NCAA's enforcement wing has "the manpower and the willpower" to investigate schools and that the NCAA must ensure schools are holding themselves accountable. The NCAA wants to create a panel to oversee complex, high-profile infractions cases. The panel will be made up of "people with judicial backgrounds or arbitration backgrounds," Emmert said, and will report to five new members of the NCAA's board of governors who won't be affiliated with any schools.
The panel wouldn't be in place until August.
"Their decisions will be non-appealable," Emmert said, "and they'll function, to a certain extent, like an arbitration panel."
Emmert said the NCAA had a presence at the October college basketball trial in New York but that he saw no need to attend himself. The NCAA has engaged an outside law firm to communicate with the U.S. Attorney's office and FBI investigating possible crimes, and the NCAA "has been thoroughly briefed on all those things that they're comfortable sharing."
"Information that comes forth in a trial can now be brought into an NCAA process, that will be very, very helpful," Emmert said during an onstage interview with the Sports Business Journal on Wednesday. "But that doesn't mean the FBI's backing up to [the NCAA's national office in] Indianapolis and dumping out all their files, as interesting as that will be. But we'll be able to get information from the previous trials that have already occurred and the upcoming trials, so we're moving forward as assertively as we can while still having to respect that process.
"We're going to do this as quickly as we possibly can."
Notre Dame basketball coach Mike Brey, also speaking at the IAF Forum, said there's surprise in the coaching community that more action hasn't been taken by schools against those mentioned in the October trial.
"As a profession, coaches look at it and say, 'Wow, that's interesting,' maybe there should be more ineligible guys," Brey said. "But I sense that is coming."