Show Notes
Eric, welcome to The Climb. We appreciate you joining us today.
Well, thank you for having me.
And this is a fond one for Michael and I in that we have a great relationship with your son. Ryan is a partner of ours and a close and dear friend of ours. So, we’re looking forward to the conversation. We won’t spend too much time talking about Ryan because there’s probably not enough time here to record all the issues with him, but we appreciate the time and have heard and learned a lot about you. I think maybe for the audience, just start with, what’s the background, where’d you come from and then, walk us through today and Michael and I’ll just bother you and interject with some questions.
Sure. I’d be glad to give you a little bit of a background. I was in college athletics for 40 some years and as an athletic director for 28 of those 40 some years. But anyway, prior to that, I lived all over the country. My dad was in the service and I was recruited NAF out of Northern Virginia and went to the University of North Carolina as a football player and I was there until I graduated.
And then I started from a university and I got my master’s degree. At one time I wanted to be a superintendent of school systems, so I’ve got my administrative master’s in administrative education. And then while there I coached football and then I coached for women’s basketball with my wife on the college level, and so one thing led to another. So, I ended up coaching football for nine years, got my degree, and then was a full-time coach. Very fortunate, wonderful experience for me. Then I went into administration. For a couple of years, I worked with the individual that was going to be the President of the one athletic directors’ association. I worked with him at Furman for two years. He was AD and then I became – at the ripe old age of 33 – an athletic director. I learned what to do and what not to do. That’s what I always say to young people. Life is full of experiences for success and people learn from them.
So, I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes and I learned from those mistakes. And then I went to NC state and worked there for five years as the number two person, and then AD at Miami of Ohio and the athletic director at TCU, where I was fortunate to hire Gary Patterson, but I was also fortunate to hire a guy named Jim Schlossnagle who is a baseball coach.
So, then I went to South Carolina as the AD – I was the AD at TCU for seven years, South Carolina for seven years, and then I went to A&M and I was athletic director there for about four years. So that’s been my professional path. I’ve done a lot of things, have been associated with a lot of people. I’ve had a wonderful, wonderful life, wonderful professional experience. Has it been easy? No. It has been challenging, obviously, because from a political standpoint and just the changes that are going on in college athletics, not only when I started but today. I feel that’s probably the most challenging time being an athletic director – today, because of what’s taking place.
To a certain extent I’m glad I’m not AD anymore. I can sit back and armchair quarterback, ‘why didn’t you do this? What did you do that?’ I feel for the athletic directors today. So anyway, that gives you a little snapshot of my professional career. That’s a very Reader’s Digest, condensed version.
And Eric, are you still consulting?
Well, I was consulting until COVID. Then it came to a dead stop. If you’ve seen what’s taken place in college athletics and obviously having to deal with the budget issues they’re having to deal with is a major, major challenge. So, there’s not a lot of financial flexibility to hire consultants and those kinds of things.
Being a consultant was very enjoyable. I enjoyed doing it, I had a lot of fun doing it, but then again, I could walk away from a situation. I did this in a couple of places as walk in, and the problems are somebody else’s problems after I was finished. So, in answer to your question, no, that’s really backed off an awful lot and rightfully so, based on the economic challenges that college athletics are faced with.
I want to go back. I do want to come back to some of that stuff. One of the things you had mentioned earlier was, did you say you coached with your wife?
Yeah, it was a really interesting story. When I was getting my masters at Furman, back in those days as a DA you made, you’re going to laugh when I say this, $1,800, and then I was a Dean, we’ll make it $3,600 a year, and that was $5400. I felt like I was rich. My wife was a college professor. Well anyway, she played college basketball and they didn’t have women’s basketball. They didn’t have any women’s sports. So some of the girls came to my wife and started up the team and she came to me about it and asked me, you know, I played high school basketball and I’ve been involved in coaching and those kinds of things, and she asked me if I would be willing to help her out. I said, ‘yeah, I would be glad to’.
And we started a team from scratch, but I said ‘you deal when you deal with women, you deal with the socialization, the relationships with people – I’ll do the coaching’. So I read Bobby Knight’s book Help Side Ball Side and I read Morgan Wooten – who is a very famous basketball coach at the math of high school and Washington DC called The Red Book. I read those two books, and so we started the team from scratch and the last year, and this is back in the AAW days, which is before the incident of late days for women’s athletics, we went all the way to the final four. In the third year of the program, we finished seventh and it’s a little bit different. They brought 16 teams from around the country and it was in Temple, Texas. It was an interesting story.
The school didn’t have money towards women’s athletics, so we had to do a lot of the fundraising ourselves. So, we drove two station wagons from Greenville, South Carolina to Temple, Texas which is a long way. We had two station wagons with a full women’s basketball team and a manager, and we just packed everybody in. So we got to the Mississippi River, and one of our players had a panic attack. She didn’t want to go over the river and she was a starter. I said, ‘Debbie, you’re going over to the river. We didn’t work this hard to go this far and for you to not’. And she said, ‘well I want to go back home’. And that was Travelers Rest, South Carolina. She says, ‘well I’m going back home. I’m going to walk home if I have to.’ And here we are at the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away from Travelers Rest. And I said, ‘gosh, what are we going to do?’ I’m panicked because not only is she panicked, but she panicked me.
So what we ended up doing was my wife and I got together and we put her down on the floorboard and put the winter coats on top of her. I drove around and drove across the Mississippi River and got to the other side about three or four miles, and I said, ‘all right, Debbie, you can pop your head up now we’re over!’
And so, you had to improvise. I don’t know that a lot of athletic directors have experienced something like that, but that was all fun. We went out there and we’ve competed and we did well. And then the next year we went all the way to Vincennes, Indiana and finished third in the country. It was a great experience. And I love doing it a little different. I don’t think many AD’s in the country coach women’s basketball on the college level.
That was one of the things I was going to ask is, when you look at the AD, is the path that you took a very similar path to other AD’s? And then also to that, 33 years old seems really young for that role.
I didn’t know this at the time, I was extremely naïve and took the job in December. I know July of 1984. I found out that the gun was loaded when I took the job, the gun was loaded, pointing at the football coach. So, I had to terminate the football coach at the end of the year. Well, I was hoping he’d have a good year and I didn’t have to do that. But anyway, we had to let him go. So, it was a challenge. I had never done anything like this before 33. And you, you had to learn a lot.
It’s a due to have to handle it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Washington Lee University and BMI, they’re right next to each other. And so, I went into the library of Washington Lee and I looked at a microfilm and read how Virginia Tech had terminated their football coach a couple of years previously, and then I read up on Virginia – I didn’t know what I was doing. So, I read through and looked at all with the media and how they handled it and all that kinds of stuff, because I could see the handwriting on the wall. And then I had to let them go. So it was, you know, it was a great learning experience for me.
How old was the coach that you had to let go that had the gun to him?
He was in his sixties.
So just talk about that dynamic for a second.
Oh, it was very difficult and he’s a nice person and everything, and I don’t think he’s alive anymore, but quite frankly VMI was a very difficult job in defense of him. It was a very, very difficult job, but to a certain extent, the profession had passed him by. And so it was time. It was a fitting time to go to take the program in a different direction. But, I made some mistakes when I did it and I learned from some of those mistakes, but it was a difficult time.
It was a difficult time for me because that’s the first time I’d let somebody go. And I finally learned – I had a pit in my stomach, but I learned that there comes to a point in time that it’s in the best interest of the university or the institution where you are that you need to separate yourself from that individual.
At a young age, I would think about his family, his children, the assistant coach’s children, all those kinds of things and agonized over that. At times I couldn’t sleep at night, but I finally got to a point where in my mind – and this is what I used later on in life – I finally got to the point where this was the right thing to do. And no matter what, even though you have a negative impact on people’s lives and families and children, all those kinds of things, this is still the right thing to do. And that’s why I could live with myself and then I was at peace with myself and then obviously we progressed and we had to separate ourselves from the coach.
You mentioned that your dad was in the service growing up. He was a general, wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was a West Point graduate. My brother played basketball at West Point. He was a general officer and therefore we traveled everywhere all the time. We traveled every two or three years. They moved us around. So, I’ve lived all over the country and I lived overseas in Germany, but I’ve lived all over the United States which was a good experience. I had a lot more appreciation and maybe awareness of how great the country was when I went to Germany – and this was before they put up the wall. I lived over in Berlin when they put up the wall. You see East Germany and you see some of the communist bloc countries and you compare them to the West, and then you begin to hear about people. And I won’t name names, but you go back to the Chicago Seven and some of those people about the virtues of communis, and then you turn around and you go into East Berlin or you go into East Germany and it’s hard to see any virtues of communism and the West.
It was so different from the West, as opposed to the East in Europe. And that made you have a great love and appreciation for this country, which I think a lot of times we take for granted.
How would you say some of those experiences helped you throughout your career? I mean, growing up all over, being all over the place? Germany, you don’t know how to meet people.
You know how to adjust and to adapt and you see things differently. Now, maybe, I was hurt to a certain extent from a fundamental standpoint because we moved so much, and from an educational standpoint. We might be right in the middle of studying geometry and geometry’s in sequential order, and then you may end up moving and you’re out of the sequence. So, there was a negative impact about doing it, but you meet people, you know how to meet people and you know how to adjust and to adapt to certain situations.
There was this one experience when we were leaving West Berlin to go on vacation in Spain. This was East Germany, and you couldn’t go into East Germany. You could go on the Autobahn, an American could, but they had a password. Our car broke down right in the middle of East Germany. I was only eight or nine years old at the time, but I was scared to death because I thought that, and there were, truckloads of East German soldiers going by on the Autobahn.
What you have to do is you have to give a pass to an American and they take it to the next checkpoint. And then they have someone to come out and get you which we did a couple of times. But as a young kid, I thought the communists – I thought they were going to take us, and we were going to end up living in Eastern Europe.
They didn’t, but that’s how you see things. And so, you have so much more appreciation, like I said, for this country, but that was a worldly experience. The Berlin wall was up, but when they ended up putting the barricades up in the fence – well, I’ll never forget it. There was a young East German person in a trench coat. He was probably about 18 or 19 years old. And if you remember checkpoint Charlie and right next to checkpoint Charlie on the Eastern side, East Side Escape, we got caught up in the barbed wire, and so the East German Stata killed him.
So he was bleeding and caught entrenched in this barbed wire on top of the wall. Those kinds of experiences, you don’t get in a normal life when you’re growing up in America, in a country, in a small town or something like that. You see those kinds of things. It makes you a lot more aware of, of what the real world is like. I was sick to my stomach, I’ll never forget it. It was on the cover of Post magazine or Life or one of those. Magazines back then having this young person dying, the Americans wanted to go over there and take them out of there and get them off and save his life. But the officials would not let him do it because obviously it could cause World War III or whatever. So, I was answering your question. My lens is a little bit different than maybe your lens because of the experiences that we had growing up.
Absolutely. Well, those certainly define us. We talk a lot on this podcase about the separation between your work life and your home life, and sometimes it’s hard to make that transition. Was your dad more of a general when he got home, then he went on the job or vice-versa? And then you’re mentioning your own life. I mean, how did you transition between an AD and a father?
It was very difficult for him. And, you know, once the general, always a general – and the pressure that he was put under, did he bring some of that home? Yes. He brought some of that home. Did we have to square our meals at dinner? To a certain extent. Do we have to ask you yes or no sir? Pass the potatoes please? All those kinds of things? Yes. There’s a lot different than white families. The way we brought up our family. So, there’s a lot more structure to it. And obviously his job, he wasn’t around very much, and he was gone in my senior year in high school. He took a tour of duty in South Korea hardship tours so I could go to one high school. And so, you make those kinds of adjustments but going back to my personal situation, I probably failed at that. My son would probably tell you that also, but anyway, my wife used to say, and my kids would say, ‘we have you physically, but we don’t have you mentally’.
Being an athletic director is a very complex, complicated job, and there’s a lot of moving parts in it, and it’s like a juggler and he’s juggling balls. Then sometimes a ball gets bigger and throws you out of rhythm. And you have a certain rhythm in an athletic department like you do in a corporation, there’s certain rhythms. And having to terminate a coach, or having to deal with a board member and a corrupt board member or something like that throws you out of whack. And so, what you have to be able to do is try to maintain that rhythm. The job was almost 24 hours a day.
And when you’re trying to build an addition to a renovation of a football stadium of $500 million a year, having 3000 people at work and all those kinds of things, all the way to ensure that your programs stay in compliance, making sure you have a schedule completed, making sure you set goals and you have a strategic plan and how you are going to get there, all those kinds of things.
Then you have all the fans and they’re at your throats, you know? So those kinds of things, it makes the job very difficult today. And to answer your questions: I wasn’t great at it. I’m a lot better in retirement about being involved and being more physically and mentally there. I’m not the best person because I didn’t do that well. And I think Ryan and my daughter have learned from some of the things I didn’t do as I should have done. And they do a much better job of raising their children and they’re more attentive than say I was when I was raising my kids.
No I can see that. I live walking distance from Ryan’s house and your son is an incredible dad. He does a really, really good job raising those kids.
He really does. I’m very proud of them.
I think one of the things that you had mentioned is some of the hiring and firing and some of the challenge within that within all these different dynamics. Maybe talk through a little bit of the dynamic of the hiring and firing with I can only imagine how many different political pieces pulling you in which directions and I’m sure you’ve got some good stories there.
Yeah, we’ll talk about Gary Patterson since that was mentioned earlier. I had hired a guy by the name of Dennis Franchione at TCU, and he was there for about two and a half years, and then he went to Alabama. Well, we ended up hiring Gary Patterson, and I’ll tell you a little story about it. So, we hired Gary, and Gary is a genius. I think this was 20 years ago before he was hired, he was a genius defensively and I’ve coached on defense. I played on defense, so I had an immense appreciation for his skill, his talents.
And another thing Gary did was Gary was great at judging talent. He could see somebody and he could project where they would be two or three or four years down the road. And as a high school senior, high school junior, he’s phenomenal in that, but you know, Gary in other areas hadn’t been really exposed to some of the things that you need to be exposed to.
He was as a defensive coordinator and it was interesting because I really didn’t know Gary that well, but I try to do a lot of research on people before I hire him. We had a national search and one of the people on the search committee, we were looking at a defensive coordinator at another school, and he said, ‘you know, they were very comparable’ but the issue was Gary was a TCU. So there wasn’t going to be a learning curve to the extent that maybe you have, if you were bringing somebody from the outside in. So anyways, he was a little bit controversial as far as the hires concerned. You might want to put an exclamation point behind that because Fran was so different and Gary is so different than Fran, and we had success under Fran, and so hiring Gary did go on a traction with a lot of TCU people in the beginning.
So, the first year, I had to make a presentation at halftime and first Gary’s here and I think we were playing Northwestern State or something like that, a school that did not have the resources we had. They had a lot of the players that had transferred there from some larger schools, well anyway they beat us. But at halftime, I went down there to make a presentation and the fans booed the heck out of me, and so I went back up to see the associate athletic director for marketing. His name was Kevin O’Connell. I said, ‘Kevin, don’t you ever do that again. Don’t you send me down’. People were booing me because of the hire, but now from a historical standpoint, Gary’s one of the best coaches and has been the longest one, the longest tenure, one of the best coaches in the history of college football. Considering the resources we had at TCU back then was not at all what the resources they have today.
So, Gary was able to really put a program on and it took time to be able to do. And it’s like I said to people at TCU that an ocean liner doesn’t change directions overnight, it’s taken TCU a while to get where they are. It’s going to take them a while to get where we want to go. So you have to have patience and great virtue, but the history has shown that Gary was a great hire. Was he a real popular hire in the beginning? He was not as popular back then as he is today, and I really give a tremendous amount of credit to Gary for what he’s done at TCU, and he’s really but them on the map. We talk about San Diego and Danny Thomason playing out in California. His exposure, the Damien’s exposure in California has done wonders for applicants from California coming to TCU because it puts you on the map and so was a good school in the Midwestern part of the country in Texas. But other than that, it wasn’t real well-known, but it’s the success athletically. There’s a good message at TCU, but athletics got it out to every nook and cranny around the country. And so people. began to find out about TCU.
But so going back to your question about hiring – it’s probably one of the most difficult parts of the job – hire and fire people. And I talked a little bit about terminating people. It’s very, very difficult, but when I was at peace with myself, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’ve analyzed it, overanalyzed it – whether to let somebody go – but to try to hire somebody, I thought it was very important.
The three things I looked for was integrity, work ethic, and intelligence. Experience was important, but it wasn’t at the top of my list. Where you have a smart person, they can make up for maybe a little bit of lack of experience, if that’s what you want to be able to say. So in my job, you have to do a huge amount of research. I mean, a huge amount of research on people. It’s like hiring Jim Schlossnagle who is a baseball coach at TCU. One of the best baseball coaches in the country. I was in a meeting with the AD at Tulane and Jim was assistant coach at Tulane, and it was the meeting with a conference of USA athletic directors and North Carolina was flirting with the baseball coach at Tulane.
I said to the AD, ‘so what would you do, who would you hire?’ Because I knew the possibility of having to hire somebody at TCU. I knew it was pretty high on the radar screen. So, I was keeping my eyes and ears open and asking questions to a lot of people when the AD said he had hired this guy, who’s a pitching coach named Jim Schlossnagle.
The Ad’s name was Rick Dixon. And so I said, ‘Rick, why?’ He told me why, well then obviously I started to track him in addition to other people, I tracked him and he went to UNLB. And Mountain West wasn’t the best baseball conference in the country. But the first year he was 500 and the next year he won the conference, which is tremendous compared from when he took over.
So, the issue was that I hired him. So what I’m trying to say to you, you got to keep your eyes and ears open all the time, and you got to have a sense of what the marketplace is. And then you got to find out. Interviewing people was about 30%, 70% was checking their backgrounds and because their actions speak so loud, you can barely hear what they say – coaches and people are salespeople.
You got to look in depth and you got to look down and scroll all the way down as you possibly can and find out as much information. So some of the things I’ve done in the past that I probably – as far as compared to people in my profession – was probably one of the individuals that did a lot of research on people because I want to make sure what I was getting to.
I didn’t want to make a mistake, but it’s not an exact science. If you have success, more success than not success in hiring people, then you’re going to stay as an AD. If you don’t, you’re going to be on the road. So I don’t know if that helps you at all. The biggest thing is research people, research, research, research, and find out about them. Who’s the true person? Like I called somebody, a coach at another school and I happen to know the women’s tennis coach. So, I called her and I asked her, ‘what is this individual like when the lights are turned off? What’s the true person?’ And so, she was going to be up front with me. She wasn’t going to lie to me. She wasn’t going to mislead me or anything like that. So that helped me as far as beginning to develop a profile. So, so that’s one of the things I’ve done. Another thing I try to do is I try to bring the players on the team.
That’s what I was going to ask.
So what I would do is I would – I would say there’s three things I try to do, the athletic department and I got through a little bit of that. We sort of have an idea of what a successful program is. So we try to mirror that to the individual. I also would sit down with the players on the team and I would say, ‘you’re not going to hire the coach and your parents aren’t going to hire the coach, but what’s important to you? What do you want? What do you want in a new baseball coach, a football coach, or whatever it may be?’ And they help develop a profile. So hiring something that’s not perfect, and you’re not going to find the perfect person, but you’re going to find somebody that hopefully has got the most of the characteristics that will match up to what you’re trying to accomplish at the institution that you are.
You’ve obviously had a ton of exposure to a ton of different personalities and people. I played college ball at Illinois Wesleyan, just T3 football, but these coaches shape a lot of these young peoples’ lives. They’re very influential people when you’re in a sports program. So over these years of these coaches you’ve come across, what are some of the attributes that you see that you’re like, ‘man this guy or girl,’ or just a phenomenal leader of these young, multiple minds? What did you see that was great? Or what did you look for when you were looking for those leaders?
Having a coach gave me a little bit of experience now. A lot of AD’s have never coached before. They’ve never coached. A lot of my generation had coached the next generation or not. You asked about the AD’s today, they’re going through fundraising or they’re going through compliance or something like that. So I’ve coached. So I always felt as a coach, that coach make the main thing the main thing, and what’s that? The student athletes and the players have to know that you have their best interest at heart.
That’s extremely, extremely important. You’re going to be tough if you have to be, or do whatever you need to do, but they have to know that it’s how much you care and you got to be able to care for your student athletes. And that’s why we’re in this business. And so when you have an athlete come back to you and tell you, ‘thank you’, you couldn’t put a million dollars on it. When they come back and tell you how much it’s helped them develop and grow in life. And personally, I made mistakes when I was younger, and in some of the people, I was probably too hard on them. I was probably too tough on them, but over time I mellowed a bit and I saw things from a little bit of a different perspective.
It’s like one of the players I had, I’ll never forget it. I happened to be very vocal. Well, he was a big, tall defensive tackle. He’s about 6’6” and he was probably about 245lbs or whatever. And he came over to me one day and he said he didn’t respond well to being vocal, being really vocal. I sat and I thought about that and I said I’ll make a change and I won’t be as vocal because he didn’t respond to that as I would be to others. But I said, ‘what I will do, though, if you screw up, I’m going to come up and whisper in your ear and tell you, get the heck going,’ or something like that. But I will tell you, I will not do that anymore. And this is what, to me, this is why we’re in the business is to help these young people and help them develop. And I’ll give you a great example.
At an institution and FCC school – I’ve been at two of them, but one of them, we had an attendance policy. And so, we had the attendance policy and my expectation was for them to go to school, because what is the number one determining factor for success in college? What’s the number one? SAT ACT class rank? What do you think? The number one thing to be successful in college academically is what? To go to class. That’s the nut. If you don’t go to school, you’re not going to be successful.
No, I found that out the hard way. Tests are a whole lot easier if you actually went to the class.
Some of the football players – that didn’t get traction with them. But anyway, with the starting quarterback. So, he was taking a class, this is the starting quarterback. Now do you people do this today? I doubt it, seriously. So othe young man didn’t go to class at night. He was warned ahead of time. I don’t remember how many in summer school, there may have been 15 classes, but he missed about 10 or 11. And so I called him in and I said, ‘listen, we’ve had this discussion,’ and I said, ‘you’re not going to play the first football game’. Now think about this today. If you did that to a person, because of something like this, then there would be a firestorm on social media. But I did what I did, what I thought was the right thing to do, because if I didn’t, then this is something that would be a negative impact on his life, if I didn’t do anything.
So anyway, to make a long story short, I told him that – well his father was furious with me. So he came in and he sat down the dad and the son and he went through his diet, traveling about, oh this is a travesty, you know, yada yada yada for an extended period of time. And I said to him, after he was through talking, I said to him, ‘Mr.,’ – I don’t want to give his name up – ‘Mr. Smith. So what are you going to do? When your son leaves here and he gets a job and of the first 15 days of work he misses 10 of them, what are you going to do? Are you going to go in and talk to the manager and tell him you can’t fire him or whatever?’ I said, ‘what I’m trying to do is teach this young man that he has a sense of responsibility and I’m going to teach him a value or something that he can take for the rest of his life. He’d better be in class because if he’s not, he’s gonna fail. But if he doesn’t learn this lesson and he gets out in the real world, he’s going to be without a job’.
And so, this is what I’m trying to teach them. This is what a coach or an athletic director I think tries to do is tries to work with young people. I’ll give you a phenomenal example, which is Jadeveon Clowney. You ever heard of Jadeveon Clowney?
Jadeveon Clowney was a student athlete at South Carolina. Jadeveon Clowney was a man among the boys, as far as an athlete. I mean, he was phenomenal. And Jadeveon Clowney was a freshman and he wasn’t going to class. We had an attendance policy, the reason we had an attendance policy was because I wanted him to go to class. Because the number one determining factor for success academically is going to class. And so, he didn’t go – when I checked, I would check with football, I check all the athletes, but mostly the football and basketball players about every two or three weeks. Well, he wasn’t going well. I warned him. And he still wasn’t going.
And so, I called him into my office on a Sunday morning. I’ll never forget it. It was the Clemson game, which was a huge risk to Alabama Auburn. So I called him into my office and at 10 o’clock, I’ll never forget it, his position coach came, the administrator for football came, the academic person for football came and I wanted his grandfather to come but he couldn’t come because his grandfather was a stabilizing factor in his life, Jadeveon’s life. But Jadeveon came and so we went through and we talked and I said, ‘Jadeveon,’ I had a round desk in my office. I said, ‘in three years, this desk is going to be piles of money that you’re going to be able to get, because you’re going to be able to make a lot of money with professional football.’ But I said, ‘what you’re doing is you’re taking, you’re knocking money off the table. And if you continue like this, in three years, there’s not going to be any money on the table because you’ll have flunked out of school. And I’m doing this because I’m trying to protect you from yourself.’ And so, anyway, it got out with the fans. They were not happy campers about doing this to Jadeveon but the issue was they were so myopic and I was trying to look at the big long-term and not the short-term. So, I ended up suspending him for part of the Clemson game. And thank goodness we won.
I was scared to death that we would lose. And who do you think would get blamed for it? I would be. And that’s what AD’s are good for. They’re good to blame on. If the coach was successful, they get the credit. If they’re not, the AD gets blamed for it, I’m being facetious. But my point is that, you know, we won. Thank goodness. So we won quite decisively. Well, now we fast forward.
I run into Jadeveon and he is in the spring time. He’s going into the academic center. He’s walking toward the academic center and I roll my window down and he’s walking, I’m in my car and I rolled my window down and I said, ‘Jadeneon, come here’. And he walks over and I knew what was on his mind: ‘I’ve got to go see the principal and I don’t want to have to see the principal’. So, he walked over and I said, ‘Jadeveon, I’m so proud of you’. He had the biggest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. And he was so happy, he was rewarded for going to class and now we fast forward. So, when I’m at A&M, the Atlanta Falcons and the Texans are practicing with each other. And there’s a bunch of players for the Falcons. And there’s a bunch of players for the Texans that had played at South Carolina or played A&M. So I asked Bob McNair, the owner, I said, ‘do you mind if I come down and watch practice?’ He says, ‘sure. Come on down’. So anyway, I came down and I saw a bunch of them and talked to them and that kind of stuff. Well Jadeveon was the last one to come off the practice and practice over.
‘Jadeveon, come here’. And I put my hand out. I said, ‘I want my money. You know what I’m talking about?’ He said, ‘yes sir. I know what you’re talking about.’ You tried to be a leader. It takes courage, and to do the right thing, it takes courage. And even though people were so shortsighted about it, I understood it, but I took abuse about it. And I did those kinds of things in the professional career that I was in because I tried to do what was the right thing to do. So, dealing with student athletes, I dealt with student athletes. I love dealing with it, and I bore you with the stories but there’s a lot of times that that’s what we’re in the business for. And so, you try to help them. And I tell them, ‘I’ve got erasers on all my pencils.’
And sometimes when we disciplined a player, I’ll never forget – we disciplined a football player defensive back at A&M because he was doing some things that were inappropriate. And so, I called him in and bottom line was, I said, ‘now if I was a wide receiver, he was the defensive back, and I ran a pose pattern on you, and I beat you for a touchdown. I mean that’s going to happen. And if it happens time and time and time again, what’s going to happen?’ I asked him, ‘what’s going to happen?’ He said, ‘well I’m not going to be on the bench’. And I said, ‘that’s exactly right. And so that’s what I’m trying to teach you is that you gotta learn from your experiences, if you’re defensive back and that guy’s beating you on a post pattern all the time, you’re not going to be playing. Well, you get out in the real world and you just make these kind of mistakes, you’re not going to be successful.’ Those kind of things that you try to relate to your athletes, and tried to do. And I mean, I’ve had this across the board of women’s soccer.
It’s not all football, basketball; it’s other sports also that have run them up. And like I said, they make mistakes. It’s a game. Life is not perfect. And so, the key is to learn from them and to learn from your mistakes. And that’s what I try to do as an athletic director with our student athletes.
No, that was great. Well, while we’re on the topic of players, any color you can share around your time with Johnny football?
Oh, Johnny Manzell. Johnny was probably the best improvisor I’ve ever seen in my life on a football field. He had gifted talents the first year there. Johnny Manzell, you would see him and he’s upbeat, positive, ‘hello Mr. Hyman, how are you doing?’ And that kind of stuff. I mean, a very effervescent personality and Johnny, he’s a really smart young man. I mean, he’s very smart. Maybe some of the things he does don’t rank high on the smartness category, but he really is. And he’s a good kid. Well, what happened when he won the Heisman? He was 19 years old at the time. It would be hard enough for a 40-year-old to win the Heisman, much less a 19-year-old kid. And there was a huge transformation with him. And unfortunately I felt sorry for him. I really did. I felt sorry for him, the Adelaide and the visibility. He couldn’t go anywhere.
I’d be sitting on a plane, we’d be flying someplace the first year. We would be playing LSU or Alabama or something like that, and he would walk down the aisle on the plane and say, ‘hey Mr., hi Mrs. Simon, how are you doing?’ Very, very engaging. Well the next year I noticed he’d have a hat on. He’d have his headset on, head down, and I felt for him because of what he had to go through. It was a very, very difficult experience for him. I really felt sorry for him because it’s just difficult for anybody to deal with that, much less a 19-year-old kid.
So there was a chain, there was a transformation in his personality and some things like that took place, but he was a hell of a football player. I’m telling you, he willed us in some games, he absolutely took the team. We played Duke in the play bowl. He willed the team to win. We played Louisiana Tech and Shreveport one time. He just picked the team up by the bootstraps. He was a very, very, very talented young man and a smart young man too. He was gifted, he was just gifted athletically. He was thoughtful. And he was a challenge. I’m not going to tell you he wasn’t because there were some things that we had to do while I was there which was very unfortunate, but the bottom line with him is I feel sorry for what he had to go through. And some of the challenges he had because of how successful he was athletically.
Well, I’m sure the personalities of some of these athletes that you have to deal with – you got some such extremely talented young men and women coming into these programs that are going through that. I can’t even imagine.
They’re all different. Every single one of them, different. They all come from different backgrounds. There’s some common things or common things that you’re trying to help them develop as time goes on. And when you bring them in, they come from all walks of life and there are certain expectations that you have, and we tried to do that I think they do it. We tried to do some things long before other people were doing them, and we tried to teach them how to dress properly. We made it mandatory for their junior year that we would bring somebody in for the male athletes and we would bring somebody for the female. My wife would do a lot of that and teach them how to dress properly. Cedric, what’s Cedric’s last name? I can’t remember, but anyways, an offense to tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals – I’ll think of it in a second, that’s what happens when you get to be my age! I tell people I have met a ton of people and I have a Rolodex in my head, and there’s a ton of people in that Rolodex. Unfortunately, when I get older, the Rolodex goes through a little bit slower.
So, anyway, we sat down and I happened to work with Cedric, but we had a tie tying contest because when you deal with young people, you got to deal with competitiveness. And so, we had a tie tying contest and there were five male athletes from different sports. Well, Cedric was who I was trying to teach how to tie a tie. And so, we had a limited amount of time, we’re in front of all of the junior male athletes and here, I’m trying to teach him how to tie a tie. So, then we had a clock stopwatch, and so we had a clock on them, and they all had to tie their tie within a certain amount of time. And a lot of them had never tied a tie before, but we were trying to help them for later on in life. Well, Cedric won the contest, he won it, and I found this out later on, he was so proud that he had won the tie tying contest. Here’s a football player, offense alignment. Well, he went out and was bragging to the offensive line that he won the tie tying contest.
So the point is we left an indelible mark with him and some of the things that he had to do to be successful. Well, we also taught them how to eat properly. We would have the fall sports in the spring time and the spring sports in the fall time, but we would make it mandatory because of, in some of my experiences that I told them one year, Steve Spurrier was our football coach. And one year, we had the coaches, we had Steve and his wife, Jerry, and then we had another head coach and his wife sitting at a table in front of all the student athletes. And we tried to teach them how to eat properly, and a lot of them didn’t know. So, when you go on a job interview, you don’t want to eat like a slob because you might lose the job. So, what we ended up doing was – I’ll never forget it – Steve, on his own, dropped a roll on the floor underneath the table that he was eating off and he got on his hands and knees and crawled to get it. Well, it was funny. The athletes just wanted to laugh. I’m here, you got the head in front of you when he’s on his hands, on all fours, trying to grab the roll, and we’re trying to teach them how not to do it. How not to do these kinds of things. But the point we got across to them in a fun way was these are things that you don’t need to do.
And for example, I interviewed a coach for the head basketball school. One of the coaches, one of the schools I was at at the time. And he showed up for the interview with no socks on, chewing gum. Well, today maybe people don’t understand it, but that was not the proper thing to do as far as how to dress appropriately. So if he’s making that kind of decision with me, what kind of decisions is he going to make later on in life? So, what I did was this young man, I went to his head coach. He was assistant coach at the time. I went to his head coach and told him what happened. Well, the coach that didn’t have socks on and was chewing gum, he ended up writing me a letter. He wrote me a letter of apology. So, he learned, but anyway, he ended up coming in SEC head basketball coach.
So, I try to tell that to the kids. I try to tell that to them. We try to teach them those kinds of things. The first year we try to teach them transitioning, like Johnny’s situation. He played in front of 500 people, maybe in high school, and now he’s playing in front of 10 million. So, what we try to do is help them make the transition. And we have former athletes, we have a panel discussion, former athletes come up and talk and all those kinds of things help them.
And then the last year we taught them how to write resumes and I would bring in people, for example, I brought in the general, the commanding general for Jackson and talked about leadership to our kids. And then another time, I brought in the guy that was head of Infor. Well Infor had 9,000 people. He’s a former track athlete at South Carolina and he was an NCAA champion. So, the kids could relate to him. So, he talked about what was important in interviewing for a job. So, I try to do these kinds of things. The former president of Shell Organization was an A&M graduate. I brought him in to teach our administrators about leadership. So you try to help, they’re not the finished product, so what you’ve got to be able to do is help them as they begin to grow and mature I their lives. So, when they springboard out of college, then they can be successful in whatever they do.
Eric, with where we are today in sports, trying to do what they can to continue to compete and bring fans in at a limited basis, and then just your historical perspective on decades and decades in the seat has become such a big business. It’s an operating number that’s bigger than a lot of companies right? With all the challenges that are out there now, what would you say to the AD’s of today? How they navigate through the rest of this season, next season, going forward.
I tell them they probably ought to go get a lobotomy. I feel for them. I think this is the most difficult time to be an athletic director. And I think there’s three reasons why. Number one is COVID and the financial impact, and we haven’t seen the end of it. And maybe there’s some positives. Maybe there could be a reset button and maybe we can bring real things back a little bit. But COVID for example, it’s going to be hit substantially because of not being able to bring the revenue and now being a private school, the school may be able to help underwrite them and make the transition. But you can talk about public schools. the state universities are really being hit financially.
So how are they going to cope with it? Well, that’s a game changer in my opinion. And it’s something that’s probably going to hang with us for several years. Now, college football is going to be important and it’s going to stay important. The amount of level of interest from fans’ standpoint, they’re staying home and they’re watching it on TV, you may see a little bit of a drop-off there, but I think college football is here, will weather the test of time, but it might be configured a little bit differently than what it is today. [inaudible] So if you have X amount of dollars and those X amount of dollars run out, what are you going to do?
I mean, you see schools around the country dropping sports. You see people are taking pay cuts all the way – they’re having to cope. Quite frankly, some of this might be healthy in the long-term for college athletics because the spending has just gotten outrageous and the amount of money that you’re paying for coaches – say what you want, but what happens is it’s just going to springboard into the next thing, which is the empowerment of student athletes. And they see a coach is making $10 million a year or $7 million a year off of their backs and they get a scholarship. I’ve heard the rationalization, I’ve been involved with it. I know it’s a little bit different than propaganda and it’s coming out, having been immersed in it for so many years that the student athletes are beginning and the families are beginning to see it. And then why isn’t there a little bit more of a balance? And, you’re getting defensive coordinators who are making two and a half million dollars $3 million. And I don’t begrudge any of the coaches. Don’t get me wrong. That’s the way our country was based.
After the impact it’s having and the kickback on it is what’s happening to your student athletes. What’s happening today, they feel they draw the short straw. And so that’s why you’re going to see the empowerment of student athletes. That’s why you’re seeing some things that could happen that could have a dramatic impact on their, their feelings and their say so. They’re going to be more of a factor in the future than they have been in the past and they feel empowered about it. And some of its saying, ‘follow the money’/ Money corrupts, the money has just gotten so big in college athletics that there needs to be a little. bit of an adjustment period, and I think that will be healthy for college athletics if that takes place.
So, there’s a lot of things that are going on. The first two things are COVID and the devastation financially, and then the empowerment of the student athletes. And then the last thing is name, image, and likeness. And that’s something that’s in the pipeline. Where it all comes out, I don’t really know, but you’re now having government intervention. They’re saying that the discrepancy between what some of the coaches are making and how much money is being generated and what the student athletes are getting.
College athletics is sort of like the wild, wild West – the recruiting and everything else. I mean, you talk to people that are totally immersed in it. This might make it more difficult. Depends on the rules and stipulations, but it’s going to allow students to generate income for themselves. So, how do you control that? I don’t know. So, you have a coach of an SEC school comes up and says ‘we got 15 car dealerships’ and they’re gonna be a little more discreet than us, but they got 15 car dealerships and one of the dealerships would like you to represent them. And so they pay him X dollars. Well, how are you going to deal with it when say that guy’s a quarterback? Trevor Lawrence at Clemson. Everybody knows Trevor Lawrence, the quarterback at Clemson. How I’ll come out in the wash I have no idea, but the pressure points are there and something’s going to come out. Some of these can come in the pipe, that’s come out of the pipeline and it’s really going to change the dynamics of what college athletics is today. Never a dull moment.
You mentioned when we were briefing earlier this week that there is a definite similarity between an athletic director and a CEO, but an athletic director always has that fan base in the media to deal with. Can you talk about how you navigated that and what that’s gonna look like?
I told my brother, a CEO of a company, and we would talk a lot of times about – I’m curious to how he runs his business and all those kinds of things, because maybe there’s something that he does that could help me. The bottom line, the difference between the challenges that he went through and the challenges I went through, there’s a lot of similarities business-wise but the biggest separator was the visibility. And so, I made decisions based on the facts. I knew at that time, not six months later, not a year later, I made decisions based on facts, but you have to deal with the media. You have to factor into the media of how they’re going to deal with it, and it’s gotten a lot worse today than what it was.
I understand that there’s a term that you’ve heard, the ‘fake media’, and to a certain extent, I dealt with that. I dealt with firsthand the media, some of them are really trusted and some of them had no scruples whatsoever. That’s just the reality of it. So I understand and I look at some of the things that are going on from a national standpoint with the John design because of my personal experiences. So, to deal with immediate is a challenge. And some of the media will probably tell you I was very – I can get my cards close to my chest – I was very guarded because I always felt as an athletic director, the athletic directors today are totally different.
They’re out there. They’re tweeting. They’re instant. They’re always there right there in the middle of it, a lot of the visibility was taking place. They want to be in the middle of it. I was a little bit on the other side, I felt that the athletic director got his name in the paper. That’s probably not good news. And you know, was I over reacting to that? Probably so, but it changed. And I know in South Carolina we met with administrators. A lot of the young people, we had probably about 50 people in the room. Well, after the meeting was over with, about 10 of them came up to me and wanted me to do a Twitter account. And so they set up a Twitter account for me. And when they left the room, I said, ‘I ain’t doing that’. And I never did, but it was a mistake on my part. I should, because there’s so much information out there, it’s more today than it was back then. There’s so much misinformation out there.
This would have been a way to combat some of that. But in my mind, I said, ‘if I start having to do that, then I’ll be on Twitter all the time, having to combat with the information that’s out there’. So, the dealing with the media and I’ve had some of the media just flat lie. And they say things that were not true. They attribute things that I said were absolutely not true. And I confronted him, I confronted him about it. And of course what happened was once you confront them, then they’re not your friend anymore. Not that they were your friend in the first place. So you have to have tough skin.
And so dealing with the media was a challenge. And like I said, I probably was over conservative with them. Maybe I should have been a little bit more open, but I just wasn’t because I just felt through my own experience, there’s some things that happened that I just didn’t feel comfortable about. I can tell you a ton of stories; hired a coach at South Carolina, very highly visible men’s basketball coach, I did everything to get them on the wrong track. And you have a number on the plane. We try to change the number on the private plane. I would park in the hangar. I would not let anybody know. I wouldn’t tell anybody. I said there was no search committee. And there was no search committee that had an. individual help me with it, but there was no search committee. He did a lot of the groundwork. And so, the media, I mean, they drove him crazy and because the fans want what’s going on, who they’re interviewing, and it’s the media.
If you throw enough against the wall, something’s gonna stick. And so, we’re trying to recruit this particular coach. Well, we did a pretty good job because in the end they didn’t have a clue. And in the end they thought the individual, when we had the press conference called they went to the airport in Columbia and they were all out there waiting with their cameras, waiting for the person to walk off the plane.
Well, there was no person because that person flew in Charlotte and I went to pick them up. And what I’m trying to say, it’s a game. That’s the way I looked at it as a game. It’s like, you’re playing chess. And I gotta get after the King, I gotta know a checkmate to King and that’s the way I looked at it. I looked at it a little bit. It was a game. And did I outwit him? What was the survival Outwit or whatever the TV show, out-think or outwit to survive. And that’s what you gotta be able to do. And I didn’t look at it as when somebody would make stories up about who I was recruiting or who I was talking to that we’re not, I had no interest whatsoever, but they were putting them out there and that irritated me because they’re lying. They’re not being truthful about it. And they said a source, ‘well a source said this, a source said’ – there was no source. I was the source, and I tried to control the message that was going out. So, all the things that we’re putting out there were not true.
I mean, some of them made sure, like I said, something may stick against the wall just based on luck. But, the bottom line is it wasn’t. And so, when we hired the guy and I was excited because we did a good job, keeping it as confidential as we possibly could – dealing with the media is a challenge. I had some people I really trusted. And I was very open with them. Some people really did not trust and I was very guarded, but I think the scruples, I think the ethics, I think the standards that the media operate today are so different than what they used to be. And I just don’t think they’re part of the equation as much as they used to be, and that may be because of the pressure of some getting it first and social media and all those kinds of things. But I think the AD’s got a lot more difficult jobs than what they used to have.
Well I do want to ask one question that we may or may not have been fed prior to this podcase, but we’ve heard about a recurring annual nightmare. What can you tell us about that?
Well, I have two of them. One of them is that I didn’t take a class I should have taken in North Carolina. So, I’m going to have to go back and go to school and finish. I didn’t really get a degree. So, I mean, that’s one nightmare. I didn’t want to have to go back and study. I don’t want to have to go back and take the class because it was just a nightmare.
And then I had a nightmare that – I don’t really want to say the school – but I had a nightmare that I’d have to go back to this particular school that I worked. And it was a very, very difficult experience for me. And I had that nightmare. I had it once a year. Now it’s fallen off a little bit, but I had that once a year. So, I have had some nightmares from somebody that has maybe mentioned it to you about, and I don’t know why it happens, but it ends up going back to those past experiences that had left an indelible mark with me.
So in the spirit to the podcast, we heard about your climb of Grey’s Peak. Can you talk about that a little bit?
I have a bucket list of things, like I’m a biker and I bike 40, 50 miles, 20 to 50 miles. And one of my bucket lists was going over the Golden Gate bridge on bike, and I did that. One of my bucket lists declined by 14 and I did that with my son. And that’s one of the highlights of my life – was it easy? No. And, I was 60 years old when I did it and we probably crossed maybe 20 people and I’d say most all of them were in their teens or their twenties. And when we cross paths, across all people, I saw one guy in his thirties, he was running up the mountain. But anyway, we got to about 1500 feet from the top, and I again, I’m 60 years old and we got 1500 feet from the top and it was getting to me and my son comes up to me and says he starts being a cheerleader.
And I said, ‘I don’t want to hear, listen to you’. So, for 1500 feet, all I said was right foot left foot right foot left foot. And I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Well, I got to the top and people don’t understand it. So this was 1400 to 14,280 feet. So, I got to the top and there’s no McDonald’s up there. And there’s no park ranger saying welcome or a bathroom or anything like that. You just lay out rocks.
It was a great experience. I loved doing it and it’ll be one of the best memories of my life. It’s one of the best memories of my life to be able to tell, to take that challenge with your son and to be together, he brought his German shepherd and to go through something like that – I’ll never forget it. And it was a unique moment in my life.
That is awesome, Eric. One of the questions that we’d like to ask, and it’s kind of become probably an unrealized passion about doing this if you think about the medium of a podcast, we’re capturing your story right now. It’s not a Twitter feed that disappears into the mix. A Twitter feeds this. This is a story that now people can go back and listen to and remember your journey along the way. And so there’s that saying that its not what you kno, it’s who you know; we reverse it around and say it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. So, and think about the people that are going to listen to this, your family, your son: what do you want people to know about you?
Well, you know, that’s interesting. You’re around here once. So if I had to look back over my career, I would stop and smell the roses. And I would want people to do the same thing because you get on the fast track and you’re turning as fast as you can turn, but if I had to do it again, I would like to go on a vacation. I’d take more time with my family. Now, the great thing about grandchildren. It gives you a second chance where with your children – and my wife did a marvelous job of raising our children. And not that I wasn’t there, I coached their baseball team and our softball team and that kind of stuff, but I wasn’t there as much as I should have been.
So, what I would say to somebody else is to try to enjoy it and live in the moment. Not in the past, not in the future, but live in the moment and enjoy, look, stop and smell the roses and to focus maybe a little bit differently than maybe what you have in your job, because – and this is what my wife told me – when it’s all said and done, when I’m near the end, who’s going to be there for me? It’s going to be my family. It’s not going to be all these other people in life. And you begin to find out who your true friends are when you’re through with your professional career. And so that’s what I would try to tell people, stop and smell the roses and enjoy themselves.
Don’t get too far ahead of themselves. And that’s the first thing that comes to my mind. I mean, there are other things, but that was the first thing that would jump out at me.
That’s perfect. Well said. Well thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all this great stuff with us. It’s definitely a different podcast for us to have, and we’ve had a lot of folks on from the business world, and not saying this isn’t the business world because clearly the roles you were in are very business and in so many different respects, but we appreciate you sharing everything with us today.
Well, it’s been my pleasure and I’m glad to be able to visit with you. And I think I said this earlier to young people, be a sponge. And listen in your life, look around and try to learn. Always learn, always learn as you’re always learning. When you stop learning, you stop growing.
And so, it’s been my pleasure to visit with you all. And hopefully, maybe there’s a person out there that can benefit from one of the things I’ve said or they can say I’m thinking about athletics, but I’m going to go get that lobotomy first. I told that to a girl, one time a student athlete at A&M they came to me and asked me what it was. You know, everybody’s got a different perception of what being an athletic director really is. And she came to me and she wanted it. What did it take to be an athletic director? How can the path I took and all those kinds of things?
Well, I said the first thing I said, ‘you need to have a lobotomy’ and she didn’t know what that was. And so, I said, ‘well go ask your parents’. And then I went through and I explained to her, well, she went to her parents and asked what a lobotomy was and they laughed. And she came back to me and she was mad at me for saying that to her.
But I say that all in fun. When I talk about that, it’s a very challenging job. It’s never been boring. It’s never been dull. Has it been over challenging? Probably. Over stimulating? Probably. But it’s been different. And I think different than the people in that, we’re all different. Your job’s different. The two of you have different jobs, different responsibilities and people in whatever walk of life you have. And so sometimes in athletics, we think woe is me, but everybody’s got problems. The key is to solve. And you have to solve your problems. Like I said earlier, the only thing is you’re so visible, which makes a difference. If you work for an insurance company, obviously you have people that work for the company. If it’s a privately owned, you don’t have shareholders stock, but if you’re a publicly traded, then you’ve got those people that you got to deal with.
So, you know, everybody’s got challenges. You just got to be able to try to hit, to take them head on.