ARLINGTON, Texas — The NCAA president called an effort to unionize players a “grossly inappropriate” way to solve problems in college sports while insisting the association has plans to change the school-athlete relationship.

Mark Emmert said Sunday that the NCAA wants to allow the big conferences with moneymaking teams to write their own rules, and those changes could solve many athletes’ complaints more effectively than unionization.

“To be perfectly frank, the notioan of using a union-employee model to address the challenges that exist in intercollegiate athletics is something that strikes most people as a grossly inappropriate solution to the problems,” Emmert said at his annual news conference, held the day before college basketball’s national championship.

He said it would “throw away the entire collegiate model for athletics.”

The NCAA has spent the last three years writing up plans to change its governance structure to allow the five biggest conferences to have different rules from hundreds of smaller schools. Because smaller schools have fought against costly changes such as paying athletes stipends, the independence of the big schools could break a logjam.

Although the issues have been simmering for years, they have drawn attention in recent weeks with a lawsuit filed by former athletes about to go to trial and a National Labor Relations Board director’s ruling that Northwestern football players should be able to form a union.