Preparing for a Changing College Athletics Landscape

When Karen Weaver began her doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007, she’d already spent over 30 years in college athletics—as a player, coach and athletic director. Still, there was a “disconnect” she said she couldn’t resolve.

“It didn’t matter what campus I was on, there was this anger at people who worked in athletics—as if athletics just had access to everything, and their priorities were higher than the academic or the student affairs priorities,” Weaver said. “So I took the doctoral degree to try to understand why.”

She found many of the answers in discussions with her classmates.

“I was so fortunate. My [Ph.D.] cohort of 24 had five sitting- or about-to-become-college presidents,” Weaver said. “And it was the conversations with them that gave me great insight, not only to what presidents assumed about college athletics, but also what athletics people were assuming the presidents understood.”

“That’s where I really began to see a gap that I’d be able to address.”

Now, almost 20 years later, college athletics programs face an unprecedented era of change. Athletes have more freedom than ever before, the cost of sports programs is skyrocketing and, in some cases, conferences are splitting at the seams. And yet, Weaver, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says many of the same foundational challenges remain.

In her new book, Understanding College Athletics: What Campus Leaders Need to Know About College Sports, Weaver compiles the years of lessons she’s learned in the hopes of helping college presidents the way they helped her. By better connecting athletics and academics, she said, college presidents can create a strong foundation for informed decision-making and smart financing even when the future feels unpredictable.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Weaver by phone about the book and the role presidents play in the ever-evolving landscape of college athletics.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: In the foreword, Michael Sorrell, a college president and former college athlete himself, says that this book is “badly needed by more than just college presidents.” So tell me, why is this book important now?

A: Too many times, we’ve selected presidents over the years without any regard to what they know or understand about college athletics. I talk about one case in the book where the only thing a potential president was asked in an interview was, “Can we beat our archrival this year?” That kind of isolationist way—not having to deal with athletics until you actually sit in the chair—has not been helpful to our institutions. So, I wanted to try to bridge that gap. As far as others outside of the president’s office, it’s important for the larger campus community to appreciate the nuances of college athletics. It’s easy to get mad at the spending that goes on within the department and think, “Well, why is that more important than academics?” But so much of why an institution says it wants people to embrace the athletic experience is about branding. It’s about reaching out to prospective students and their families, the earned and paid media that the university gets, the alumni engagement. We often talk about these things as if they’re automatics. But they are not. So understanding the ecosystem is important for a wide range of people.

Q: Throughout the book you talk about how little many college presidents know about athletics. Why is that when it is often such a big part of college and university life?

A: We’ve had a long history in higher education of isolating academics from athletics. They’ve been siloed for a variety of reasons. There might be a sense that it’s not as important as academics; it doesn’t impact our national rankings in the AAU. But I also think athletics has been operating in its own world, trying to focus on and be good at what it does.

To strengthen both sides of the equation, each has to understand the value that the other brings—especially in this era of great change in higher education and athletics. How can we make this work together, rather than operating in silos?

Q: Speaking of change, the book aims to answer three key questions: How do college athletics work? Why are they more than just an extracurricular these days? And how are they changing? I want to focus on that last one in particular. What changes do college presidents need to be paying the most attention to?

A: It’s the old assumptions. I can’t tell you how many alums I’ve talked to who say, “I want athletics to go back to the way it was. They were amateurs and they weren’t focused on getting paid.” These alumni are becoming disenchanted with the new world of college athletics.

We need to help them understand that it is not going back because of the issues surrounding the antitrust violations. Athletes deserve to get a portion of the money that was generated, particularly at the bigger schools. We know things are not going to go backwards. But we don’t know what the new organizational structure is going to look like. So we can’t assume that our alumni are always going to be in our court and willing donors to our program. They consume sports differently. They come to games late. They leave early. All of those things have changed so much. So we have to really check our assumptions.

We also have to accept the fact that the budgets are changing dramatically. So, we have to ask, what can we afford to do? And we have to be realistic about the costs involved, including paying people and staffing things correctly, like athletic medicine, academic advisers, those types of things. It’s just not a head coach who’s going to go out and recruit. That’s where things were, you know, 15 or 20 years ago.

Presidents are just becoming aware of where the money comes from to fund the budgets.

Many presidents come to a campus where maybe 50 or 60 percent of the athletics budget is funded by the university tuition and student fees—and they’re probably surprised about that. And that’s just talking about Division I, because in Division II and Division III, almost all the budget is subsidized by tuition and fees.

When you really look at that funding model in this era of rising tuition costs, growing student fees and the pushback from students who don’t want their fees to go to funding athletic revenue share, presidents realize it’s a whole different context. The easy answer would be to say, “Fine, athletics, if you want to have revenue share, then you’ve got to go outside and look for it.” But presidents are realizing they must have a better understanding.

Q: Can you say more about NIL and revenue sharing and what presidents need to know in those areas?

A: It was always kind of crazy that everybody else on campus—whether they were working in the cafeteria or the president—could monetize their name, image and likeness because it’s an inherent right. Yet the athletes couldn’t. So, now that’s one of the greatest advances for athletes, but it’s been a real shock to the general public. And it comes with a side issue of mental health. The market is exploding for certain athletes, but other athletes are really struggling with the mental health challenges of trying to always promote themselves and brand themselves and get more followers and likes on their social media. So schools have really got to address the pressure that athletes are putting on themselves.

In the revenue-share area, we can talk about football and men’s basketball, but we have underresourced other sports, particularly women’s sports, in terms of promoting them, working to get them on TV … So leaders need to be thinking about the fact that we’ve been undervaluing other sports for so long. You look at the growth in not only women’s basketball but in softball and volleyball and other sports that are emerging, and there’s a whole explosion that we just have not accounted for. It could be a real upside, but it also creates competition for attention and time and all those kinds of things.

Q: So considering all of that, what do college leaders need to know to lead well?

A: Well, I’ve asked myself that question over the years, and the one thing that I try to emphasize throughout the book is [that they have to ask]: What is our mission? How does athletics relate to our mission as we are today, not to how we were 20 or 30 years ago? We know how much the landscape has changed on both sides [academics and athletics]. So, to assume that what we’ve always done is what we’re going to do in the future is not right for either side.

Q: What do you make of the recent dustup between Louisiana State University and the Southeastern Conference over whether athletes who have played professionally can play on a college team? How does it relate to the arguments in your book?

A: Fundamentally, what we’re wrestling with is who’s in charge and who has the authority to crack down and say you’re not following our guidelines.

Being a member of a conference is a privilege. It’s not a right. And while we haven’t seen a lot of instances of schools being kicked out of conferences, we can look to other examples like the Pac-12’s near implosion as an example of what happens when you do break things up. It becomes a different landscape financially.

So conferences are a little hesitant to blow things up, but they’re also very hesitant to have a school in there that doesn’t feel like they’re following the rules.

You also have to understand the structure of a conference. Presidents make up the board. So ultimately, while they are supposed to put the conference first, there’s this inherent tension. Often, presidents are caught saying, “I’m supposed to operate on behalf of my institution. That’s my job here.”

So this really puts presidents right in the middle. I don’t think we’ve really talked about that enough.

Q: On that note, Sorrell also noted in the foreword that “athletics at every level are out of control.” Do you agree with that? And if so, can you help me understand how we got there and why it’s important for college presidents and others to acknowledge that level of mayhem before they move forward and try to address the college athletics system?

A: Do you have an hour?

I would say that at some institutions that may be true because they’ve just allowed spending to continue, and they’ve assumed that they can always raise enough money. But for the vast majority of institutions, it’s been these sudden shifts in the legal landscape—whether it’s about revenue sharing, restrictions on noncash compensation or changes to transfer options—that have forced them to ask: What does this mean for us?

For example, when your rosters are changing every year—if not every semester—you don’t have that consistency. So the assumptions we’ve made about enrollment and retention, recruiting, and the ability to sell a four-year degree are all unsettled right now.

For presidents who want stability, that is really a very difficult place to be.

And secondly, I would say—and this is probably different than what you’re expecting—we have pressure coming from underneath in the youth sports area.

That’s because youth sports are exploding with private equity money, so they’re building fancy new facilities and they’re paying for travel teams. The average cost per year is now $10,000 per youth sports participant in order for them to play in the travel ball leagues.

If they come to college and don’t see that kind of experience, why would they choose your school over somewhere else? So that bottom-up pressure coming from youth sports is real, and that could really impact the university athletic programs’ recruitment and retention.

Q: What role, if any, do you think Congress should play in setting the rules and guiding colleges to address the out-of-control system?

A: I think fundamentally we have to make the changes ourselves. I don’t think we can look to Congress to solve it, because as many people know, when you look to Congress you get some of what you want, but you get much of what you don’t want. And that can be really problematic for college athletics.

We’re often looking for someone else to solve our problems, and I really believe we [as higher ed institutions] have to solve many of our problems ourselves.

Q: What do you think people—including college presidents and the broader public—should watch out for over the next few years when it comes to college athletics?

A: My hope is that people—including the media [and] alumni—would be respectful of the realities that university leaders are facing when they make difficult decisions.

They could be about a whole host of things like adding and dropping programs, changing divisions, etc. That’s a very real possibility for a number of schools, because they just can’t afford where they are. And while it’s really easy to be critical of a school that leaves one conference to be more competitive in another, that’s the reality of this situation right now.

No. 2, I’d like to see us get back to emphasizing the value of our degrees; they carry more than just revenue generation. What we can offer is lifetime earnings for so many of these athletes. This may be a moment in time when they make money, but what happens next?

In this era of revenue sharing and NIL, many presidents have accepted that they’re not going to be the only stop in an athlete’s academic journey. But they also need to be focused on creating a positive experience while they’re at their school and say, “We’re not just going to throw in the towel. We’re going to do what we can to make this young man or woman a stronger candidate for jobs when they graduate.”

Q: Are college athletics fixable? And if so, what will it take to reach the solution?

A: I believe that they are fixable, but I think we truly have to separate ourselves out from trying to be semipro.

And if that means a group of colleges have got to go off and do that by themselves, and everybody else looks at a different model—possibly a model that’s more educationally focused than championship-only focused—that might be the way to go.