At this point in time, some of the hottest topics in college sports are name, image, Iikeness, deregulation, and student-athlete experience.
In part two of our sit down with athletics director Danny White we discuss the challenges of the job these days along with NIL, and much more.
Q: Let’s start big picture a little bit. Just how different is your world as a college athletics leader right now. It seems like it’s something new everyday. How challenging is your job these days?
Danny White: It’s vastly different I would say in the last 18 months and I think that if you don’t allow your mind to be somewhat flexible right now you would probably drive yourself crazy. I think this would probably apply to any profession, but when the traditional rules of engagement are completely changing and in some areas it’s a little bit nebulous and gray, that can drive people a little bit crazy. So with all the changes happening nationally and everything that’s happening as college athletics is evolving, I think I have had to be pretty adaptable and I think our whole staff has had to learn and is still learning to get comfortable with a little bit of unknown.
That’s kind of where we are. That’s not a Tennessee thing. That’s a college athletics thing. That’s probably been the biggest shift. There are still the basic blocking and tackling things coming to Tennessee that I knew we needed to fix and get better at and we are working really hard at all those things. We have to get the budget where we want it to be. We have to get our facilities back to the best in the country. All those things are going to matter in any version of what college sports looks like. But there is some unknown and I think anyone in my position would say that across the country.
Q: Is it more stressful? You knew things were behind when you took this job. So you knew you were playing catch up. With all the changes and unknowns out there, do you feel like you are further behind or do you have to get your mindset that I can’t get completely on top of things because it’s changing so rapidly?
White: Probably the latter. I got good advice early in my career and as a fund raiser I would say this to major gift officers, but this really applies to anything on our staff and probably to many other professions as well. If you can focus on the most important things, you are obviously going to have a lot more success. To do that, you have to filter out things that don’t matter as much. You need to prioritize. The ability to prioritize right now is more important than it’s ever been for me personally and I think probably for anybody that works in college athletics.
Going back to accepting the things you can’t control and the unknowns are going to be unknown. We aren’t going to fix those in Knoxville in a day. I can’t say you know what, I’m going to come up with some certainty on some key topic and by next Thursday we are going to have that figured out. That’s not a real thing. Just focus on the things that move the needle the most and what we have been doing is looking for opportunities where we can bring Tennessee back. You mentioned playing catch up. With all of this unknown and distraction nationally there are some opportunities for us and we are trying to take advantage of that.
Q: A year ago when we sat down and visited, I asked you about NIL and you said it would be your biggest concern in terms of how it changes college athletics over the next 3-5 years. Your concern was about losing the fabric of the college game versus it becoming a minor league sport. You have seen NIL for almost 11 months. Where are you with NIL? What are your concerns with it after seeing it in place for nearly a year?
White: I think at some point in the not so distance future, we need to have some national regulations. I think that would be best for everybody involved. NIL combined with the transfer portal is a little troublesome. I think about the quality of life for everybody involved whether you are a student athlete or a coach. With recruiting, there is no time to not recruit right now. It’s an all the time thing. People talk about the opportunities for student athletes which we are all about. We pride ourselves in being the most student athlete-centric department in America. Whether we are today or not we are going to be. We are constantly working to focus on their experience.
So you can look at it one way. Why couldn’t that kid transfer whenever they want.? Well there’s another kid on the roster who had just worked their tail off to earn a spot during spring ball that may get supplanted. In any transfer transaction, what I always think about is that it’s not as simple as one student athlete that’s deciding to transfer. It’s the teammates they are leaving. It’s the teammates they are joining. It’s the kids playing the position they are going to at the new place. There are a whole lot of student athletes involved in any of those transactions. I think we need to be thoughtful of having some boundaries and some guidelines that everybody understands and everyone manages in ways that they want.
Right now, there are no guidelines so it kind of lends itself to situations where in each of those transactions there’s going to be winners and losers. There’s going to be people that you can say that’s not fair that happened to them. We have to work on more rules around it. Not over regulating it. The deregulation and what’s happening with the transformation committee across the board with the NCAA is going to be awesome. We have way too much bureaucracy in college athletics and deregulation is going to be very good. But having a small amount of rules and actually having accountability around those rules I think is really important. I think when you look at the NFL or the NBA, that’s what they have. They have a finite amount of rules but they actually have accountability around those. We should try and do the same thing in college.
Q: How do you put the toothpaste back in the tube on NIL to regulate. I think the catch word right now is 'guardrails'. How do you put guardrails in place after the last year and courts have been involved in ruling? How do you go about doing that?
White: NIL is kind of a buzzword too. Is it NIL or is it a whole lot of different avenues this thing could take? Really where all of this started is that the resources got so large that 'why aren’t the student athletes getting a piece of the pie?' The traditional concept of NIL and we are seeing it happen on our campus where student athletes that have success and build a brand with our fanbase are able to monetize that brand in our market place. I think that is a great success story. The toothpaste should never go back in the tube on that. But, where it’s being applied into competition, I think to use your buzzword, we need guardrails like any competitive space needs. With the best fanbase in the country and with what we are calling America’s best college sports city here in Knoxville we have this great market place. What the guardrails are or that the future looks like, I like where Tennessee is positioned. We just have to focus on being the best version of ourselves.
Q: So you are comfortable overall with the concept for the student athlete. You are not anti-NIL?
White: No, I think it’s great and I have always been there. What I am concerned about is looking like minor-league sports. I think the connection to higher education is what makes college athletics special. It’s why our alumni care so much. It’s why our fans, who maybe didn’t even go to Tennessee, care so much because they care about this place. The common bond our student athletes have with our fanbase, our alumni is special. That’s what I think drives the emotional connections in college athletics. If we lose that then we become minor league sports. I can’t think of a version of minor league sports that’s prolifically successful and popular like college athletics. I don’t say that as a doomsday. I say that as a caution. We need to be smart about how we set this up so that we don’t lose that connection. These are college students that have a strong connection and affiliation with Universities. That’s what’s made the whole thing unique.
Q: The Sprye group has been discussed a good bit over the last year. Where are you with your relationship with the collective?
White: With the new Tennessee state law, we can now collaborate with them in ways that weren’t permissible a month ago. All along, they have been good community partners. We have a director of name, image and likeness who has experience in compliance and marketing. Her job is to focus on NIL—making sure we are educating Spyre and others who want to engage in that space on what the rules are and what the laws are. We couldn’t speak to them on collaboration for NIL deals (before the recent state amendment). Now, we can for current student-athletes. There’s still an NCAA rule that specifically says we cannot be involved in any kind of NIL or any kind of inducement activity in recruiting. So, there’s a line between recruiting and current student-athletes that we have been very strict about with our coaches and staff—and we will continue to be. I like where we are in that space.
Q: You mentioned the transformation committee and deregulation. There is a lot of topics in that realm of things they are looking at. What are two or three things you hope to come out of that committee.
White: I don’t want to get ahead of them in citing specific things. I have thoughts about it obviously. But just in terms of the spirit of deregulation, there are key components to creating competitive equity and creating a predictable cycle and schedule throughout the year that benefits high school prospective student athletes, current student athletes, coaches, everyone involved. There are ways we can organize this without having — I don’t know how many pages the NCAA rule book is now. We need to care less about the minutia. We did this to ourselves. The reason the rule book is so thick is because as member institutions we kept adding new rules. At one point we were talking about bagels and peanut butter. I just think there’s a level of minutia that we have to get way out of and focus on the things that matter the most that relate to the student athlete experience and competitive equity. By doing that if you simplify things and you aren’t having to chase down a million potential little violations about rules that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
I think the accountability and policing side of it become simpler and we need to get a lot better at that. It can’t take 3, 4, 5 years to have consequences for intentional rules violations. We are going to have accidental rules violations. We have those at Tennessee. Everyone has those. In an appropriate compliance culture and protocol we should be self reporting those all the time. It’s when your intentionally breaking rules there should be consequences to that. Not five years down the road but relatively quickly. I think by deregulating and simplifying things that’s a path to get there.”
Q: You have mentioned student athlete experience a couple of different times. What’s a good student athlete experience in today’s college world?
White: There’s a 100 things we do to give them this platform. If we are recruiting the right student athletes in any sport, they should be really passionate and competitive about the sport that they are in. Chances are if they are good enough for us to recruit them, it’s not just about talent, it’s about what’s between their ears and the drive they have to be the best version of themselves. We talk about the sports science and sports medicine end of things. In that you have nutrition, psychology, strength and conditioning and a whole host of things that we can do. We have really good people. We have a whole staff of people around them to physically maximize who they can be. We have unbelievable coaches. The best coaches I think in the country to help them improve in the sport they are passionate about. We have the Thornton Center that is phenomenal with academic services and student athlete welfare and development in terms of life skills. All these people, and I said this to all of our teams, people with master’s and doctorates many who were student athletes themselves who are passionate about the students athlete experience.
We invest in this staff to give them this well rounded awesome experience. It’s about being an elite athlete seeing how good you can be and how that translates into competitive success. Hopefully having a championship experience. We don’t shy away from that. We want competitive kids who come in here and want to win. I think if a student athlete came here for four years and didn’t have success as a part of their team and told me they had a great experience. I think we signed the wrong kid. I think part of having a great experience is having success, winning a championship and leaving here with a college degree. A college degree has always been a part of the experience and I think an enormously invaluable experience not by just putting them in any degree and the path of least resistance but pushing them into finding what they are passionate about because for every single one of them the ball stops bouncing at some point. They all need a college degree in something that they care about and can build a career around. We do all of those things. I don’t know how to quantify what that looks like. What I always tell teams when I visit with them is if you think about it, it’s really unique in that never again for the rest of your life will you have that many people that care about your development as a person, as a student and as an athlete. Being a student athlete anywhere is unique. I think at Tennessee it’s better than anywhere. We try to make it the very best.
Q: A lot of people want to tie that experience into money. Where is the line for student athletes from the money standpoint where they become employees versus it’s being the experience you just talked about. How concerned are you with pushing that line?
White: I’m very concerned about pushing the line too far where we start to look like minor league sports and disconnect from higher ed. That’s the biggest concern. I look at things like the Alston money as a great thing that we can now do for them with academic rewards. Same thing with cost of attendance. We don’t want them and their families to have financial strain while they are going through this world class experience that I just described that we are providing for them. But a few thousand dollars while they are in college that shouldn’t be a part of the equation.
The experience of coming to Tennessee learning about themselves, developing into a man or a woman, getting that college degree, investing themselves into their team, the experience you get from that, having success I don’t know that you could put a number on that. We can quantify it in terms of all the salaries we pay, the staff and infrastructure we put into that. It’s a whole lot more money than whatever they have put in the student athletes pockets in terms of walking around money. Beyond financial quantifying, it’s an invaluable experience. It’s way more important and way more powerful than whether we can give them a few extra thousand bucks here and there.
