NCAA president Mark Emmert expected a question about Penn State. For once, it didn’t come.

Speaking at the Wright State men’s and women’s basketball tipoff luncheon on Monday at the Nutter Center, Emmert touched on a variety of issues — just not the one that has dominated conversation since he took the job in April 2010. Most of the topics Emmert addressed had to with Wright State athletics.

Obviously, one of the more pressing issues for Wright State is the health of its conference, the Horizon League. The departure of Butler to the Atlantic 10 Conference and the search for one or more replacement schools is an issue that remains important as long as the search continues.

It’s also an issue faced in recent years by almost every conference in the country.

“Obviously, I hope it all works out in the end, and I think it’s starting to settle out,” Emmert said. “This began predominantly with the so-called BCS conferences and a shakeout among those handful of schools. It’s clearly driven in large part, though not exclusively, among aggregate media rights and trying to get combinations of schools that provide those universities with bigger media packages. That then trickles its way throughout all of college sports.

“It uncovers a lot of financial needs and desires some schools have, and some decisions were made for good reasons and some were made defensively and some were made hastily, and none of us, me in particular, like the spectre of schools jumping around like that.”

Emmert also spoke about reexamining the NCAA rulebook, which is famous for being hard to decipher, even for college coaches and administrators who have been in the business for years.

“It is 450 pages long,” he said, “and it includes a lot of things that make perfectly good sense and a lot of things that candidly don’t make any sense at all.”

Keeping up with the times — adjusting rules regarding text messages, for example — is one challenge for the NCAA. Practicing common sense is another.

“We have two to three pages that govern, for example, the mailings you can send out to respective student athletes,” Emmert said. “This doesn’t, on the face of it, seem like a major ethical issue in America today. It says the envelope can be this many inches by this many inches. You can have three colors on the envelope. You can only put X number of pages in that envelope. The pages in that envelope can have only X number of colors.

“For the life of me, I can’t see where the threat to American society is in having an envelope that might be an inch bigger. But we have created a system of regulation over 20 years that has gotten way down into the weeds of an athletic department.”