For Tennessee Director of Athletics Danny White, the first 100 days on the job might very well feel like 100 months or even, 100 years.
Amidst the firestorm of an investigation that saw a football program gutted and a legend retire at the helm of the athletic department, White arrived from Central Florida to restore pride and chart a course into the future for a deeply proud athletic department. Most notably, Tennessee’s football program---the bell cow of the UTAD---has been looking for the right answers since November of 2008, when Hall of Fame coach Phillip Fulmer was handed his walking papers.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Tennessee’s new athletic boss to talk about the last three months, the challenges he’s trying to navigate and the vision that he is trying to impart. Here's part one of our two part interview.
Question: This is your third time taking over a program. How different was this move based on the fact that is/was basically a 48 hour search?
Danny White: It was a lot different for a variety of reasons. One, I never thought I would leave UCF. I thought I was in a destination job, which was different from previous transitions. Pretty quickly as I got to talk to the leadership here and just started to realize it was a pretty unique opportunity professionally. Another part that was different than my first two AD jobs is that we are really good in a lot of sports. It’s not an overhaul competitively. Maybe our brand doesn’t have the best perception right now which speaks to the influence of football on the overall athletics department and the University for that matter. My previous two stops I walked into a lot of change across the board in all sports. I don’t see that here. I see some really competitive sports. Just about all of our teams are humming at a really high level so that part probably allows us to be a little more focused on football and some of the things we need to do to support all sports obviously, but to turn football around a quick as possible.
Q: Did you have more unknowns about this job because the search was so fast? Was there more learning about the job after you took the job than say when you went to Buffalo or UCF?
DW: Probably because of the timing but college athletics is so small. It’s not like Tennessee was the first school to contact me when I was at UCF. There were plenty of opportunities, but what made this one unique was the leadership here and the fact that it needs to be rebuilt. Just working in this profession as an athletic director, I knew a lot about Tennessee, like I know a lot about just about every place out there. There is only 128 FBS schools. There are only 14 schools in the SEC. The surprises have probably been more positive like I mentioned I didn’t realize how good we were across the board in our Olympic sports, probably because of the speed of the search I didn’t have time to research that. There has not been any negatives since I have gotten here that I wasn’t expecting. The challenges we are facing I kind of expected them and I knew a lot about Tennessee just I as I evaluated the landscape of college athletics and different places around the country and in the southeast.
Q: Obviously, you had to jump in and hire a football coach, outside of that week-long search what has the last 100 days been like?
DW: It doesn’t feel like 100 days, it feels like 10. I would like to and, I think this summer when things slow down a little bit, to have more time to go walking around and get to know people in our department in terms of just from a relationship standpoint. We have hit the ground running in a variety of ways. Obviously, on boarding a football staff is a big deal. Hopefully we are not doing that again for another 20 years. Setting the tone in terms of how we support not only Josh but his entire staff. You only have one opportunity to make a first impression. I’m a believer in culture, however you want to define that. Having a positive and confident outlook from our staff, our coaches, I think that impacts winning and losing. Bringing them in, in a way that builds confidence in who we are but more importantly in what we can do here. There’s a lot of work involved in that. Obviously, I was new here myself. I brought some folks up from UCF and learned pretty quickly there’s some really good people here. It’s been a total whirlwind. Then I guess externally we made some and aren’t in the process of making some structural changes to kind of modernize a little bit our approach in how we interact with the marketplace and our fan base. I know our fans are going to see a little different approach in terms of game day experience. We need to more aggressively generate revenue and build our budget. We have had to make some changes there and bring some people in that I’m excited about. We will reap the benefit of that over the next 2-3 years as we launch some more modern best practices in terms of fund raising, revenue generation that I’ve had success with at previous stops.
Q: Was the financial situation a surprise? (Tennessee’s total revenue ranks 16th nationally according to the most recent reports, which puts them 8th in the SEC in revenue generated)
DW: Going from Buffalo to UCF, I thought ‘Holy cow, what am I going to do with all of that?’ and we were broke (at UCF). Coming here I felt like what are we going to do with all of that money and we are broke. I think as you move up the budget is bigger but there’s more expenses, more challenges and high expectations. If we want to be the best athletic department in the country then we need to resource that. I have said that my whole career and I think fans need to understand that. The resources need to match the expectations. There was a time where Tennessee probably could have said we have the best facilities in the country or close to it. We can’t say that right now. We have some work to do on the facility front in Neyland Stadium and in facilities that impact our student athletes in recruiting. If year in and year out we want to be up at the top of the college sports paradigm then we should have one of the biggest budgets and we don’t right now. I think we have the best fan base. I think the opportunity is there to have one of the biggest if not the biggest budgets in college sports but we have to get to work to monetizing that stadium and the arena to put some of the best practices we see across the country in places that candidly have biggest budgets then us and shouldn’t.
Q: I want to get back to some of that in a minute but back to the whirlwind for a minute. After you get Josh Heupel hired, how did prioritize what was next or did you?
DW: What I keep reminding myself and my staff is that we have to be careful not to bite off more than we can chew because there’s so much work to do and that’s a good thing. There’s so much opportunity. Maybe I haven’t done the best job of prioritizing because we are trying to take on a lot, but I really feel like if we are going to maximize our opportunity here then there are some things that we need to address and we are in the process of doing that. Obviously we have to get football up and going and we have. I think they had a great spring. We have to work through this NCAA investigation as quickly as possible. And the things I mentioned such as how we interact with our fan base from an external standpoint and how we go about growing our resource base. Those are the things I have been most focused on. I want to start building out relationships with our donors and our University leadership and all of those things that are so important. Kind of in the background of all of this has been COVID. We have more sports competing at one time than we ever have before. Up until the last week or so I couldn’t enter the team bubbles. Now I’m vaccinated so I can get to know our coaches a little bit more. Our staff is strained in ways we have never seen in college sports in terms of communication staff, our event management staff, just everybody. We are hosting more events than ever at one time. It’s a unique time on campus in terms of the volume of competition. And it’s a unique time coming into a new job where normally I would be out every night with different donors getting to know everybody. But you can’t really with COVID.
Q: It’s obviously unavoidable, but has that set things back for you? Has it been frustrating for you?
DW: I think there have been some advantages. The normal we are operating under now is that Zoom is ok. So we have done a lot of Zooms with a group of 6-8 donors. That’s a whole lot more efficient than having 6-8 different trips going to see them. I am looking forward to doing that but I have been able to at least start a relationship with a lot more people more efficiently. I have probably been able to spend more time on campus than I normally would in taking on a new AD job. I think it’s moved us along further in terms of things we are working on internally with our strategic planning process and externally with some things we have coming up to galvanize this fan base and get people pulling in the same direction.
Q: In terms of the NCAA investigation, is the University’s part done or is it still on-going?
DW: It’s still on-going. We are trying to be extremely thorough. We want to be looked at as we move forward as an athletic department that has as much integrity as anybody. What we are not going to do is take a shortcut and leave one piece of information un-investigated for lack of a better word. We want to make sure we know everything that happened so we can be extremely straight forward with the NCAA. We are being extremely transparent with them. They are participating in all of our interviews so when we come out on the backside of this we have the reputation we want to have. We play by the rules we all agree to. To the extent we can be a leader in cleaning up college sports we want to do that.
Q: I’m assuming you do not have timetable on a resolution right now?
DW: It’s hard to say right now. There are still things we are learning as we go through it. What I can say is compared to other examples of NCAA violations we have seen in college sports, we want to move a lot faster. I think the University before my arrival did the right things involving an outside counsel that has great experience working with the NCAA, involving the NCAA from the jump so it doesn’t have to be re-investigated. We are all doing it together which helps the time line a ton and just being aggressive. Owning up to the fact that we took some missteps. We are addressing it and dealing with it as quick as possible. That’s what I hope. By the time we finish whatever that timetable looks like we can show an example that it doesn’t have to take years. This is something that you can get through very quickly and get back to building our program.
