Athletic directors have long been termed the CEOs of collegiate sports departments, but increasingly schools are taking the term literally, looking outside the typical sports pathways for business leaders to take the reins.
“We’re talking about a disruptive ecosystem in college sports now,” Jed Hughes, Korn Ferry vice chair and global head of practice, said on a phone call. “The landscape is changing quickly, therefore you really need an enterprise leader. Enterprise leaders are strategic, they’re operational, they deal with people, they transform businesses because they anticipate. They create, they achieve results.”
Stanford looked to the broader business world for an AD in hiring John Donahoe last month. Donahoe, who starts Sept. 8, is best known as the CEO of Nike from 2020 to 2024 and previously as the chief executive at ServiceNow and PayPal. Given his lack of athletics experience, the announcement last month took pains to note Donahoe is a lifelong sports fan, has played basketball, and that “head coaches have long been among his greatest models for leadership.” He is unavailable for comment before beginning his new job, according to the school.
Hughes, a former pro and college football coach with three decades of experience as an executive headhunter, thinks the Donahoe hiring is a sign that more colleges will turn to executives outside sports to head athletic departments. He already placed an executive without a traditional AD career path into an FBS job in 2016, joining Syracuse with John Wildhack, who spent 36 years at ESPN, including as executive vice president responsible for programming and production.
“People are on the precipice” of hiring business executives, Hughes said.
The reason for new perspectives? In the past, the typical college AD “hasn’t been faced with the multitude of things going on in college sports,” he said. “There’s complexity without rules, which makes it the wild, wild west in a way.”
Two weeks ago, the University of South Florida announced it was looking for a CEO of Athletics. “This new title reflects more than a change in language. It reflects a new era in college sports,” USF chair Will Weatherford said in a statement. “To succeed in this environment, USF Athletics must be run like a serious business—because it is one.” USF’s search is ongoing.
“It’s no surprise to me that individuals hired for leadership positions at major institutions aren’t coming from intercollegiate backgrounds; they’re coming from the business world,” Troy Frank, a professor of business administration at Lincoln University, said on a phone call from Jefferson City, Mo.
Frank, who has researched management of major conference athletic departments as part of his work, said looking toward business leaders is “a natural byproduct in terms of the way money has influenced intercollegiate athletics.”
One former AD at a football power told him he viewed the athletic department as the multimillion-dollar subsidiary of the larger corporation—the university. “He operated it from the viewpoint of senior vice president at a Fortune 500 company. He didn’t view himself as an academic,” Frank said.
In that way it makes sense for schools to just go get a Fortune 500 executive. But if universities are going to compete with the corporate world for talent, they face some hurdles. College sports is an appealing gig for business leaders, “but the issue is salary,” Hughes said.
Simply put, athletic director jobs pay less than the corporate world. Tennessee’s Danny White is the highest paid athletic director in the country, earning $3.35 million last academic year. Compare that to publicly traded companies with revenue in the same range as FBS schools, $170 million to Texas’ $330 million. The average CEO pay for those companies is $4.7 million, according to a Sportico analysis of the top executive compensation at 105 publicly traded companies, which constitutes about a third of all public companies in that revenue range. Athletic departments also come with the potential drawback of being not-for-profits that often run perennial deficits.
“One of the reasons Stanford hired Donahoe is he’s retired. He’s made his money,” Hughes said. “If you’re going after really successful people, they’re making a lot more than ADs are going to make.”
Company executives tend to get long-term incentive packages, some form of equity, even in a privately held business, and plentiful stock options in a publicly traded one. “You’re not going to get that in college,” Hughes said.
It also won’t be enough to simple pluck a CEO from the ranks of publicly traded business, either, Hughes added. Successful executives placed into sports environments should have three or four varied types of experiences—working at businesses in different stages of their development, having to manage various stakeholders, and showing some sense for transformational management, for instance.
They also need to be fully aligned with the interest groups at a school, from the college president to the faculty and of course, the coaches, who very often will be making a greater salary. In Donahoe’s case, he was already on Stanford’s advisory committee and had earned his MBA from the school.
While things may be starting to change, the ranks of athletic department heads at the Power 4 conferences remain filled mostly with people who had prior sports administration or university administration experience. Besides Donahoe and Wildhack, Notre Dame’s Pete Bevacqua was notably plucked straight from the corporate world. Bevacqua was chairman of NBC Sports when he was hired in 2023 to learn the ropes from Jack Swarbrick and replace him last year.
“Seeing the trend of hiring individuals out of strict corporate background, you have to ask the question: Do they come with a better skillset?” Frank said. “Do they have a better business acumen than a dean of an academic department at a university? They raise money and make money for the university as well, they depend on dollars, and those dollars have to be managed. I don’t know the answer, but over the next five, six years we’ll see the impact. We’ll know the results.”
(This story has been corrected to reflect that Danny White is the AD for Tennessee, not Texas.)
