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D1.dossiers... are ready for the AD openings at Austin Peay, Cal State Bakersfield, Charlotte, Delaware, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, San Francisco, South Carolina State, Southern Utah, Texas Southern, UC Riverside, Wagner and Washington State. Just $349 for an entire year of access to all dossiers. (link)

The Albuquerque Journal’s Geoff Grammer reports New Mexico is expected to announce its plans next week for a national search to find the successor to now-Colorado boss Fernando Lovo. Grammer says current Interim AD/COO Ryan Berryman, along with Deputy AD/CRO Jalen Dominguez, are expected to pursue the opening. Grammer also notes that outgoing President Garnett Stokes, who is retiring this summer, will make the hire as the institution will not wait for a new CEO to be named first. (link)

Must watch: Check out Georgia AD Josh Brooks congratulating Ole Miss’ Keith Carter after Thursday night’s Sugar Bowl thriller. Brooks’ main message: “Make sure you enjoy it… the first one, I never enjoyed it.” (link)

More from Wake Forest AD John Currie’s chat with the Demon Deacon Digest’s Cameron Lemons Debro, this time on Wake’s challenges in competing for third-party opportunities alongside larger brands and finding an edge moving forward: “Well it starts with good evaluations and figuring out what are the things important to us based upon the prospect pool. I think that retention, there's always a big focus on that. … Having the rev share in place to go along with the relationship and the position on the team and all those kind of things, enable you to be able to have it from a strategy standpoint. … I don't feel like we're sitting on our hands, we're leveraging our strengths. We have the ability to go to the cap, that's not universal. I think it will be universal next year, but it wasn't this year, and we did. Then being smart and disciplined about evaluations and valuations. Then we have a lot of advantages from our institution from a financial standpoint. We don't have millions of dollars in debt service related to facilities. Our facilities we've improved over the last 10 years, $175-200M dollars in facilities, that's all been built with gifts and philanthropy. That means we're not spending annual revenue dollars to pay for the Sutton Sports Performance Center or the Shah Basketball Complex. That's what a lot of universities have had to do because they didn't get out in front of the facilities stuff like we did.” (link) 

Business of College Sports Founder Kristi Dosh with this: “I've confirmed with the College Football Playoff and The American that Tulane is receiving $8M for its first round appearance (instead of the $4M everyone else received) because of a one-time payout to account for the change this year from the top four conference champs getting byes to just the top four teams.” (link) Dosh has the full breakdown for how much each conference has earned through the quarterfinals this year (not including travel expenses): SEC: $32M; Big Ten: $24M; ACC: $8M; Big 12: $8M; American: $8M; and Sun Belt: $4M. (link)

With one through four seeds tallying a 1-7 mark over the past two years of the College Football Playoff quarterfinal games, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde writes on how to fix an imbalance of the event’s framework: “It’s probably too small a sample size to make sweeping judgments, especially when digging a little deeper. While the record of top-four seeds (excluding Indiana) is 0–7 in quarterfinals coming off a bye, the record of the betting favorites in those games is 5–2. It’s not like the quarterfinals produced a flood of fluky results. …Two seasons of data don’t fully support the premise that teams with a first-round bye are at an inherent disadvantage. But there is still an obvious change to be made that would give top-four seeds the advantage they earned throughout the season: On-campus quarterfinal games. …Of course, moving those quarterfinal games out of neutral-site locations would require one thing that college sports leaders have resisted for decades—breaking up the bowl cabal, or at least reducing its stake in the proceedings. The traditional big bowls could still be played, of course. But fewer of them would be part of the playoff—maybe just the semifinals and national championship game. Untangling the ties to the bowl industry shouldn’t be that difficult, but there is ingrained resistance to it.” (link)

CollegeAD reports ULM Senior Assoc. AD for Compliance Cody Sparrow is headed to Marshall to become Senior Assoc. AD for Compliance & Student-Athlete Success. (link)

HBCU Gameday’s Steven J. Gaither reports Howard has extended a job offer to former record-setting Bison QB Ted White, who was on the Maryland staff this year as an offensive analyst. (link)

We’ve all heard a bunch about Tulsa Football’s “Portal House.” Now we can finally take a look inside. (link)

CollegeSports.jobs again stood out in December with YoY growth from 2024 to 2025 increasing by 53.54%, while the overall market experienced a substantial decline of 61.04%. The NCAA Market also saw a decline of 18.09% last month. (link)

Loyola Marymount AD Craig Pintens hosted WMT VP of Growth/former South Carolina senior external leader Dr. Eric Nichols on the Margins of Victory podcast to discuss the critical importance of a "modern tech stack" in the NIL era, arguing that organizations can no longer let up once a stadium is sold out. Some key nuggets from the conversation…

 

➤ "You and I have spent time in high major universities that have sold out football stadiums. Sometimes when you get to that football stadium being sold out, you feel like the job is done. And at least that's the way I have felt in many years past. That was the aim of the operation and you kind of take your foot off the gas a little bit. Well, now with NIL, the capacity limit is removed. So, you need a modern tech stack not only to identify all of your fans, but you have something to sell them when the stadium is sold out. You have something to sell that Louisiana fan of the LSU Tigers who might not make it back to a game." 

 

➤ On the state of the industry, the pair discussed donor fatigue, with Nichols observing there used to be an “eight-year, 10-year time horizon. Now, I need to raise money so I can provide NIL that may or may not contribute to this elite athlete joining our program to win a championship this year. And you know, there's only going to be one champion this year. There's going to be a lot of disappointed fan bases. And do they have the capacity? Sure, probably. ... I don't know what the limit is, but I'm more concerned about the return if you will."

 

➤ On why teams should link to external content on their official sites: "If there's a great feature story on your basketball guard even if you didn't write it, it's okay to link to it on your owned and operated platforms. Everyone will do that in social media but they resist it on your owned and operated platforms. I don't understand why that's been a nut that's been hard to crack in this industry. And I think if you can train your fans that your platform is the trusted source, the curated source... then I think now you're going to see your audience grow."

 

➤ On rethinking stadium configurations: "I kind of want to attack the stadiums and the seating of stadiums and arenas and almost think of it like a dump them out and then pick them right back up and how would you reconstruct them? ... The fact that we still have bleachers in most of college stadiums is kind of ridiculous even to say that. ... I'm not the type of fan that sits in my seat the whole game. I'm a walker. ... I think those [social spaces] extend to college and they create new revenue opportunities by reconstructing your ticket packages."

➤ Here’s the full convo. (link)

With the College Football Playoff Management Committee facing a Jan. 23 deadline for next season’s format, the CFP has yet to extend its agreements with the Orange, Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton and Peach Bowls, per The Athletic’s Ralph Russo, who notes those agreements are expected to be signed. Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark adds: “The New Year’s Six bowls have been fantastic, great partners, and they put on an incredible experience, as they have here in town with the Orange Bowl. So we’ll see. Everything’s on the table, and hopefully we’ll be very thoughtful about it. … One person’s opinion is, I think wherever we settle now is something that we should play out for the foreseeable future, because you need to get some rhythm behind it,” he said. (link) 

More from Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark prior to Thursday’s Capital One Orange Bowl, as he reiterated his support for College Football Playoff expansion from 12 to 16 teams that includes five automatic bids for league champions, noting he and other power league commissioners will potentially meet multiple times prior to the aforementioned deadline to reach an agreement. Yormark: “We’ll see what we can do — or not — for next year. I know everyone has been working hard. There’s a lot of nuances to it, and we’re working through that. … Hopefully we can come together and, whatever that change may look like, we can get there sooner or later. If we stay at 12, I’m happy with that, too.” Yormark also acknowledged that any discussion of a revamped bowl season revolves around the sport’s calendar, remarking: “How do we work together to figure out the calendar? It’s a little clunky for sure. I’m relatively new still to the system, but it needs to probably be modified and we’re going to work on that.” (link)

Wake Forest AD John Currie sits down with Demon Deacon Digest’s Cameron Lemons Debro to talk about schools going over the rev-share cap and how that works within a system requiring collective buy-in to get college sports back on track. Currie: “College sports isn't going to go back to where it needs to be. College sports is going to evolve to what we hope and we intend is a sustainable model that makes sense, is transparent, and is fair. Fair does not mean equal. Fair in college athletics has never, ever been equal. … Everybody has their advantages, everybody has their disadvantages, it's about maximizing your advantages. … I talk to some of the athletic directors at the schools where the media says they've committed $25M or $30M or whatever, there's a lot of variability and there's no iron-clad formula to what that means. It means that at most places, that number includes some amount of money that is from their designated institutional share. So if they got $12M or $15M in their institutional revenue share for their FY27 budget and they front loaded money, they paid it ahead of time in June so they've got $6M or $8M from this year. And they think they're going to be able to generate $3 or $4 or $5M in above the cap NIL deals with their sponsors. We'll see how that all shakes out, but I think that's the exception rather than the norm when you talk about $25M or $30M dollar rosters or whatever. I don't think that's the rule, I think that's the exception.” More from Currie. (link)

California Baptist will eliminate men’s golf, men’s swimming and diving and men’s wrestling at the end of this academic year ahead of its transition to the Big West. Lancers AD Micah Parker: “While we had hoped to continue offering our full slate of athletic programs in this new environment, it has become clear that changes are required to realize the university's goal of achieving greater competitive excellence that the new Division I era demands. … As the university looks toward competing in the Big West Conference starting in July 2026, it was necessary to discontinue some athletic programs in order to offer remaining student-athletes and teams the best chance to succeed.” (link)

East Carolina AD Jon Gilbert joined 94.3 The Game’s Hoist the Colors program to talk about the challenges of scheduling Power 4 teams moving forward after four winning seasons in the last five years. “It's nearly impossible. And look, I have a lot of good friends that are athletic directors at big schools, in big leagues, and I'm constantly going, ‘Hey, the Pirates need a game,’ and they're, ‘Hey, there is no chance we will play you all.’ So, they're hard to get. We're going to continue to work to schedule them. They're important for us. We've got several over the next couple of years, but with the SEC and ACC going to nine [league] games, that is going to get progressively harder for us. We're going to continue to work to try to find those games, most likely as buy games on the road.” More from Gilbert. (link) 

Through Dec. 27, non-College Football Playoff bowl viewership on the ESPN family of networks was up 13% YoY to 2024, averaging 2.7M viewers overall. The Pop-Tarts Bowl led the group by drawing 8.7M viewers on ABC to rate as the top non-CFP/NY6 Bowl since the 2019-20 Citrus Bowl. Overall, four of ESPN’s 23 bowl games posted their largest audiences on record, with nine reaching at least a five-year high and eight achieving at least a 10-year high. Full top 10 list. (link, link)

This season’s College Football Playoff Quarterfinals witnessed a combined attendance increase of 4.4% compared to 2024, largely fueled by the Allstate Sugar Bowl’s return to New Year’s Day after being postponed last year to Jan. 2 as a result of the New Year’s Eve attack on Bourbon Street. Overall, the quartet of games drew a combined attendance of 295,643 vs. 282,958 last season, led by the Sugar Bowl’s announced crowd of 68,371 for Ole Miss’ upset win over Georgia. Once again, the Rose Bowl topped the 90K mark, drawing 90,268 to watch Indiana’s blowout of Alabama. The Cotton Bowl drew 71,323 for Miami (FL)-Ohio State, hitting the 70K mark for the fourth time in five years, while the Orange Bowl’s attendance for Texas Tech-Oregon came in at 65,021 despite concerns about plummeting ticket prices on the secondary market. (link) 

Indiana’s Rose Bowl victory over Alabama triggered a clause in HC Curt Cignetti’s contract that should earn him at least a $1M raise, according to Front Office Sports’ Alex Schiffer. By reaching the CFP semifinals, Cignetti’s contract now requires a “good faith market review,” requiring the sides to meet within 120 days after the Hoosiers’ playoff run ends and adjust his salary to “no less than third (3rd) amongst active head coaches at institutions which are eligible to compete for the CFP.” If IU doesn’t offer a top-three salary as part of that review, then he’s off the hook for his entire buyout. Ohio State’s Ryan Day currently has the third-highest known coaching salary at $12.5M. More. (link)

Oklahoma State is planning to hire North Texas Senior Assoc. AD for NIL/Football GM Steve Keasler in a similar capacity, per OKState247’s McClain Baxley. (link) 

Purdue Assoc. AD of Strategic Communications Patrick Crawford joins College.town’s Kristen Eargle to discuss his career path to Purdue, his leadership role as president of College Sports Communicators and more. On key factors to consider when building brand strategy: “You want it to be authentic … whether you're announcing a new stadium, a new coach, a new team, a new schedule or something way more simple than that. Fans have this idea of the tradition and the pageantry related to their school. If you go out of left field with something, it'll feel like, ‘well, wait a second, this isn't the Purdue that I know.’ So, starting first with how do we message this and how do we creatively convey this in a way that is authentic to the school, first and foremost. … I think one of the most powerful assets any school has … are the student-athletes and the coaches. We have those human elements. … We have folks playing the sport of their choosing here at Purdue that are at that transformational part in their lives. They're in college. … There's a humanizing element of college sports that gives us collateral to how we message our sports teams and how we message the brand that is different than professional sports. We have student-athletes and yes, there is a whole lot more that comes with that now in the current landscape of college sports, but what we do at Purdue is we want it to be authentic to the brand that is Purdue and we want to use what always is a resounding message point with our fans and that is the student-athletes.” More from Crawford. (link)

The MVC will begin publicizing men’s and women’s basketball player availability reports the night before and two hours before games through a partnership with HD Intelligence. (link) 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s John O’Connor examines the new video challenge system that went into effect this season in college basketball allowing coaches to contest “out-of-bounds calls, basket interference/goaltending and whether a secondary defender was in the restricted-area arc.” George Washington Men’s Basketball HC Chris Caputo: “My guys are looking at it pretty closely. I don’t know how quickly you can get it, to be honest. I’ve talked to a number of officials about it. It’s hard. … The good officials are going to take a little bit of time on a play like that to give you a chance to look at it,” Richmond Men’s Basketball HC Chris Mooney: “I think if the officials know you're considering (a coach’s challenge), they’ll give you extra time. You can make a sub. It takes up a little bit of time.” The NBA has used the system, and Mooney said his plan was to watch more NBA games to see how teams “are utilizing it, what the correction percentage is.” (link)

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(NEWEST!) Athletic Trainer (University of South Carolina – Upstate / Spartanburg, SC): The Sports Medicine Institute (SMI) has a team of 30+ outreach athletic trainers. We are seeking a certified athletic trainer to serve the healthcare needs at USC Upstate. More details HERE.

Job openings by discipline, posted in the past 15 days...

Learning Specialist (The George Washington University / Washington, DC): More details HERE.

 

Assistant Athletics Director for Football Academics (Texas A&M University / College Station, TX): More details HERE.

 

Student Services Coordinator (Vanderbilt University / Nashville, TN): More details HERE.

Assistant Director/Coordinator of Business Operations & Payables (University of Arkansas / Fayetteville, AR): More details HERE.

 

Sr. Associate/Executive Sr. Associate AD/Leadership and Culture Development (University of North Texas / Denton, TX): More details HERE.

 

Sr. Executive Associate AD, Business Strategy & Capital Projects (University of Miami / Coral Gables, FL): More details HERE.

 

Associate Athletic Director, Business Administration (Florida State University / Tallahassee, FL): More details HERE.

 

Chief Financial Officer (University Athletic Association, Inc. at the University of Florida / Gainesville, FL): More details HERE.

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Assistant Coach, Men's Soccer (Butler University / Indianapolis, IN): More details HERE.

 

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Associate Athletic Director, Marketing (University of Alabama / Tuscaloosa, AL): More details HERE.

 

Director of Creative Services (University of Central Arkansas / Conway, AR): More details HERE.

 

Coordinator, Digital & Social Media (Big Ten Conference / Rosemont, IL): More details HERE

 

Associate Director - Athletic Communications/Creative Services/Graphic Design (Middle Tennessee State University / Murfreesboro, TN): More details HERE

 

Creative Geniuses! (University of Nevada / Reno, NV): Whatever your creative discipline, send us a note, resume and/or portfolio directly to: jshoji@unr.edu

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Assistant Athletics Director, Eagles Club (Florida Gulf Coast University / Fort Myers, FL): More details HERE.

 

Director of Development (United States Air Force Academy / Colorado Springs, CO): More details HERE.

 

Assistant Director of Development, Athletics (University of California – San Diego / La Jolla, CA): More details HERE.

 

Dir., Philanthropic Giving - Southeast (United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee / Miami, FL): More details HERE.

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Assistant Director, External Relations (University of Delaware / Newark, DE): More details HERE.

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Sr. Executive Associate AD, Business Strategy & Capital Projects (University of Miami / Coral Gables, FL): More details HERE.

 

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Assistant Director, Behavioral Health & Performance (Tulane University / New Orleans, LA): More details HERE.

 

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Senior Director of Ticket Operations (Texas A&M University 12th Man Foundation / College Station, TX): More details HERE.

 

Assistant Director of Ticket Operations (Texas A&M University 12th Man Foundation / College Station, TX): More details HERE.

 

Associate Director of Ticket Services (East Carolina University / Greenville, NC): More details HERE.