What Syracuse’s hire of an ESPN executive tells us about college sports – Chicago Tribune

A dozen years ago, the athletic director at Syracuse was a gray-haired, cardigan-wearing, Winston-smoking man named Jake Crouthamel. The job he held immediately prior was head football coach at Dartmouth. Crouthamel’s tenure ended in 2005, which doesn’t seem that long ago. In the realm of college sports, it might as well be eons. That was when sports people ran athletic departments, because the most prominent feature of college sports was sports.

Since Crouthamel’s retirement in 2005, Syracuse employed two athletic directors, both of whom had climbed sports administration rungs. The man they chose to succeed them aptly reflects the state of college sports: Until Wednesday afternoon, John Wildhack was ESPN‘s Executive Vice President for Production and Programming.

Wildhack had worked at ESPN since 1980, becoming one of the company’s top executives and rights negotiators. He has no prior experience in athletic administration, which makes him both a wild-card choice and a perfectly logical hire. Businesspeople run athletic departments now, because the most prominent feature of college sports is business.

Professor Dan Rascher, the director of the sport management program at the University of San Francisco, described the trend as temporary in a unique way. The professionalization of college sports is moving faster than the rate at which traditional administrators can be trained in the new expertise required to run the small corporations athletic departments have become. But in time, perhaps the span of a few years, traditional administrators will be people like Wildhack, or at least they will have been trained up through the ranks to develop his business-forward skill-set.