UNC Chapel Hill Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited
for clarity.
Bubba Cunningham has been the athletics director at UNC Chapel Hill since 2011, overseeing 21 head coaches. He is shifting to a senior adviser role in July as the university seeks his successor. During his tenure, UNC has won 24 national titles, including the men’s basketball championship in 2017. More than $225 million has been invested in capital improvements during his tenure, which has included three strategic plans. Before arriving in North Carolina, he was the AD at the University of Tulsa for six years and Ball State University for three years. He earned bachelor’s and MBA degrees from the University of Notre Dame.
You’ve had a great, great journey and a great, great experience. What is it that troubles you the most about sports today?
I’ve worked at four different schools, two public, two private, two regional, two national. So I’ve gotten a lot of different experiences. What concerns me is that we’re starting to lose sight of what we’re about. As an intercollegiate athletic entity, it’s always been about creating opportunities for students to come to campus, get a great education and play the sport that they love.
But the acceleration of the commercial activity in sport has really changed the dynamic. Particularly in football and basketball, we have to really recenter ourselves and say, what does it look like in 10 years, and how do we get there? We’ve been off track for about five years now.
What do you mean by commercial activity?
Television is driving conference affiliation and it drives what time you play and determines what day you play. The commercial activity is driving the revenue up. The media contracts are greater than they’ve ever been. Salaries are greater than they’ve ever been. Facilities are better than they’ve ever been. Services to students are better. But that has created other challenges that we didn’t anticipate. The students want to move more freely. They want a transfer portal. They want NIL activities. All of that has an impact on the individual students and their academic life.
How does a coach build a sense of teamwork and cohesion when he or she has an enormous amount of movement due to the portal and NIL offers?
It’s probably the biggest challenge we have in college. Athletics today is trying to build a culture within your team that kids will stay in. Athletics is hard, school is hard. But when it gets hard, they leave and go somewhere else where it’s an easier opportunity for them.
It used to be you would come and you’d sit on the bench or you didn’t play at all. And you get to play a little bit more as a sophomore and junior. Senior year you would start. That doesn’t happen anymore. If you don’t come in and start right away, you’re thinking, there’s another opportunity somewhere else. The instant gratification is
a challenge.
Some athletes are given some significant dollar offers by universities. How would faculty and administrators think about a basketball player or football player making significantly higher income than they do?
We have some student-athletes across the country that are making a lot more than the faculty members. It’s a challenge that I think we have to really wrestle with.
I would never in my wildest dreams think that we’d have to go to Congress to try to help solve our problem. But ultimately, I do think we’re going to need some assistance from Congress. We are losing every single lawsuit relative to antitrust, and that means that we can’t have any rules that aren’t challenged. So I think we’re going to have to get some limited antitrust protection.
Ultimately, and this may be heresy, but I think at some point we’re going to have to get to collective bargaining for football and basketball, if not everybody else.
You mean like a union?
It’s a little bit more like a glorified independent contractor because independent contractors obviously can select when they would participate. The job in college athletics would be a little bit different. But I think we want to make sure that student-athletes remain students primarily, but have the ability to collectively bargain.
So we could put some limits on the transfer portal, limits on eligibility, limits on some of the benefits they receive. But then compensate them if you negotiate for that.
What are you the proudest of in your tenure at Carolina?
Our coaches and our student-athletes, they’re just fabulous. There’s nothing more inspiring to see than these young, energetic, enthusiastic, positive students. And they were attracted to the institution by our coaches. You go to a coaches meeting, and you swell with pride for the success that they’ve had and the mentorship.
And then when they come back to campus, they realize what a great experience it was, though when they’re here, they think it’s so hard and tough. They come back and say, ‘This was the best four years of my life.’ So that’s what makes it very inspiring.
For sports fans like me, it seems complex and complicated for Carolina to be playing Stanford on both shores of the U.S.A. Where is this going?
Conference affiliation has been driven by media rights, and so people have moved out of the regionalism of conferences, which is how they were designed.
I think we’ll see the pendulum swing back a little bit. The NCAA has already changed its governance structure to be more sport-specific. You’ll see greater alignment between the NCAA and the national governing bodies.
If Carolina plays another big school, the viewership is going to be higher. Therefore, the revenue from advertising is larger, right?
We just had a conference meeting yesterday and we were given the new television numbers. The states of California and Texas are now in-market for the ACC Network because we have schools there. The monthly subscription rate for ESPN is significantly higher when you’re in-market versus out of market.
So that raised the level of commercial activity. The universities all receive the benefit from adding Stanford and Cal [to the ACC.] The problem is Stanford and Cal have to travel to the East Coast for volleyball, soccer and wrestling. And it’s a hardship on our student-athletes. I think the focus has to return to the student-athlete, what’s best for them.
How do you balance the cost and benefits of athletics?
Most schools at the NCAA level are heavily subsidized by the institution. When I went to Ball State, there was about a $17 million budget, and we generated about $4 million a year in revenue. When I first got there, I was thinking about why we have an athletic program, and what’s important about athletics to make this place better?
I came up with the mission for intercollegiate athletics at Ball State. We’re here to enhance the educational experience of all students. It wasn’t the 300 that played sports. It was for everybody. You wear the logos. You wear the gear. You’re proud to be associated with your school. If our athletic program doesn’t make the school better, we shouldn’t have it. I feel the exact same way about North Carolina.
Suppose I’m playing basketball and I say I’ll come to your school, but I need X dollars because three other schools want me. Where is this going to end?
There are three things that we need to do. If I look out 10 years,
we have to have an intercollegiate athletic system that’s legally defensible. We can’t get sued by every single state because somebody wants to play six years instead of four, or somebody wants to say junior college doesn’t count. Every lawsuit we have about limiting a student’s ability to do something, we get sued and we lose. We need Congress to say you have a limited antitrust exemption so you don’t get sued all the time.
Then I think it has to be financially viable. Not only do we have rising revenue, but our costs are going through the roof. If we can collectively bargain, then I think we have a chance to keep our costs somewhat in check. We also will be able to limit the number of transfers, and we’ll be able to limit the compensation, maybe for coaches as well as student-athletes.
Third, we have to make sure that we stay educationally based. We always want to stay connected to the university. I don’t think we want to just license our brand to a minor league team and let them play in our stadiums. We have to come to a consensus. Right now, everyone’s trying to leverage each other and try to get to a different position.
What other challenges keep you up at night?
Giving kids an opportunity to go to college is something that I’ve always really valued. My dad was a first-generation college student. He joined the Marines so that he could go to school on the GI Bill. I have two sisters and a brother. And he said, the greatest gift I can give you is education.
I really want to continue to find ways for kids to go to college and get a scholarship and get a great education. Athletics provides that incredible opportunity. So that’s what keeps me up at night. How do I ensure that other kids get an opportunity to do what my dad was able to do and provide for us?
You’ve been with Carolina for 15 years, and you’re going to stay and help the chancellor strategically. When you look at a team that isn’t doing well, what are the parameters to decide if you keep or change the coach?
You want to continue to have a dialogue with the coach. You want to make sure they know where they stand. I ask our coaches to give me three goals in six different areas.
I want a competitive goal, an academic goal, a financial goal, a compliance goal, a student-athlete service goal and a student-athlete experience goal. Six different areas depending on the sport, but it is based on the resources that we provide them. I evaluate them differently based on those different areas.
The life of an AD has ups and downs. If teams are doing well, you’re on top of the world. If it goes the other way, you catch a lot of grief for it. How do you dealwith that?
You have to be around, like the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee meeting tonight that I’ll be at. You have to be in the locker room. You have to be on the sideline. You have to show support for your coaches and your student-athletes, win or lose.
But part of the struggle is you’re going to lose. You’re going to get knocked down. Do you get back up? Do you quit all of those things, all those lessons you learn in sports? They’re great for life and they’re good for all of us. Because if you don’t lose, you don’t have the jubilation of winning.
The greatest excitement I’ve seen was when our women’s fencing team won the ACC championship [in 2018.] Nobody in the arena thought we should have won. It was our coach’s 51st year. I still get chills thinking about it. It’s why you do what we do. ■
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