It is difficult to trace when, exactly, Mark Emmert’s tenure as the N.C.A.A. president went from skidding to stalled, as the governing body of big-time college sports descended from juggernaut to supplicant.

There are plenty of possibilities.

Maybe it began in 2017, when federal authorities unearthed criminal corruption in Division I men’s basketball. Perhaps it was in 2019, when the association desperately wanted California’s governor to block a challenge to its rules and failed, spurring a political rush against the multibillion-dollar college sports industry.

It could have been in 2020, when the association asked the Supreme Court to hear a case about student-athlete benefits that it eventually lost unanimously. Maybe it was last June, when Congress ignored the N.C.A.A. and made plain that it would not swiftly offer the industry safe harbor from problems that universities had spent years not solving on their own.

Now, with Tuesday’s announcement that Emmert will vacate the N.C.A.A. presidency by the middle of next year, the help wanted era of college sports appears headed toward another milestone: a posting for a lucrative job with diminished power and an ill-defined future.

Already, John J. DeGioia, the Georgetown University president who also leads the N.C.A.A.’s Board of Governors, is talking about the coming months as an “opportunity to consider what will be the future role of the president.”

It is true that the N.C.A.A., which has often looked to others to fathom and fix its troubles, is undergoing a reinvention as it tumbles from a mighty regulator to something much closer to an event organizer.

The leadership transition will signal just how much universities want to salvage an organization that, fairly or not, has come to symbolize the toxins rather than the benefits of college sports. It could reveal just how enticing the turnaround job of college sports is to sought-after executives. And it will signal, maybe more subtly but no less importantly, how the industry’s power structure is shifting away from the N.C.A.A.’s headquarters in Indianapolis and toward conference offices in places like Birmingham, Ala.; Irving, Texas; and Rosemont, Ill.

Although Emmert has been a part of the N.C.A.A.’s myriad troubles — and although plenty of administrators welcomed the announcement of the “mutual agreement” that will lead to his departure — he is not the only one.

The association, largely governed by about 1,100 member colleges and universities, has often been characterized by reluctance, lethargy, bureaucracy, selective indifference and factionalization. While the N.C.A.A.’s freshly rewritten constitution looks to make it into a leaner money-printing machine since the association still controls the television contract for the lucrative Division I men’s basketball tournament, the replacement of a titular chieftain can do only so much.

It was just last month, after all, that Emmert said at the Division I women’s basketball Final Four that it was “entirely up to the schools” whether to overhaul the revenue distribution system that rewards conferences with windfalls for men’s basketball performance while offering nothing for the triumphs of women’s teams.

Emmert, a political scientist who took over in 2010 and led the N.C.A.A. at moments when it flexed power as never before, has long favored the representative democracy defense, and it is not entirely meritless. But the pileup of crises includes some of his team’s own making, and one result is a presidency whose appeals for a successor may be limited to a big salary, access to private jets and reliably good Final Four tickets, not meaningful control.

So it came as no surprise when, for instance, Robert M. Gates, the former United States defense secretary who oversaw the N.C.A.A.’s constitutional rewrite, said through an aide on Wednesday that he was not interested in the post. A spokesman for Kirk Schulz, the Washington State University president and a former N.C.A.A. board chair, said Wednesday that Schulz “has no interest whatsoever” in the opening.

A Division I conference commissioner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid rupturing professional relationships, roared with laughter when asked if they wanted the job. (The commissioner was not Greg Sankey, the Southeastern Conference leader who has already emerged as arguably the most powerful figure in college sports. There are no indications that he has designs on Emmert’s office.)

Through an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, Emmert and DeGioia declined to be interviewed on Wednesday, allowing the four-paragraph statement they issued on Tuesday to stand, so far, as their lone public explanation for the change atop an industry that Emmert has touted as “a public trust.”

In the statement, Emmert spoke of how he had “emphasized the need to focus on the experience and priorities of student-athletes” and that he was “extremely proud of the work of the association.”

DeGioia offered no praise for Emmert, whose contract the board extended just last April, before the Supreme Court weakened the legal shield the N.C.A.A. had cherished for decades. Instead, he said, “With the significant transitions underway within college sports, the timing of this decision provides the association with consistent leadership during the coming months plus the opportunity to consider what will be the future role of the president. It also allows for the selection and recruitment of the next president without disruption.”

The N.C.A.A. said that Emmert would stay in his job “until a new president is selected and in place or until June 30, 2023.” The potentially long runway for succession is not necessarily unusual for the N.C.A.A., which relied on an interim leader for roughly 13 months between the September 2009 death of Myles Brand and the October 2010 arrival of Emmert, whose selection had been announced in April of that year.

But it will likely be months before anyone knows the details of the organization Emmert’s successor will inherit. Sankey and Julie Cromer, the athletic director at Ohio University, are leading a committee studying possible changes to Division I, the N.C.A.A.’s most valuable tier, with a report expected this summer. Similar panels are studying Divisions II and III, and the recommendations will do much to shape the future prominence of the N.C.A.A. in the management of college sports.

They will also help clarify Emmert’s legacy. For now, the expected trajectory looks much like his tenure: the broad N.C.A.A. facing problems and looking for others, whether the conferences or Congress, to solve them.

Emmert’s exit, though, poses a chance for the association to show another side: what it can do, or what it will not do, when it must make a choice of its own and has nowhere to run.