Trustees and Presidents: A Podcast for University Leaders On College Athletics

For more info about the certificate program: https://www.gse.upenn.edu/events/information-session-new-athletics-enterprise-certificate-program"General manager" used to mean one thing. On a college campus in 2026, it means at least two, and the difference matters more than most administrators realize.Karen Weaver is joined by Kristi Dosh, Forbes sports business contributor, founder of Business of College Sports, and creator of the first job board for NIL roles, and Scott Woodruff, General Manager of Villanova Sports Properties with Playfly, who brings 29 years across the Detroit Lions, Northwestern, and the Cleveland Cavaliers.Kristi explains how the GM title migrated into athletic departments to manage rosters, revenue share, and player valuation, and why the job looks completely different from one campus to the next. Scott describes the parallel GM role on the multimedia rights side, where jersey patches, court logos, and campus-wide corporate partnerships are reshaping what an athletic department can sell.Along the way: the Nebraska arbitration and what "warehousing" means, why "best efforts" NIL letters aren't contracts, the twenty-somethings negotiating six-figure deals without a law degree, unresolved Title IX questions around revenue share, and what presidents should be asking their ADs right now.

Most university presidents are reacting to the upheaval in college athletics. Dr. Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell is running scenarios on it — a habit she picked up long before higher ed.Before she became Washington State University's 12th president (and its first woman in the role) in April 2025, Cantwell built her career in national security, where scenario-based planning is standard practice: you can't know what's coming, so you prepare the country for many versions of it. She's an engineer and a research administrator by training, with prior stops leading Utah State and senior roles at Arizona State and the University of Arizona. She now applies that same discipline to a program left behind by the near-implosion of the 108-year-old Pac-12 — and to a roughly $20 million annual athletics revenue gap.In this conversation with host Karen Weaver, Cantwell argues that athletics is the leading edge of every disruption bearing down on higher education — demographics, politics, the collapse of state funding, questions about cost and value — and that WSU has roughly a three-year window to position itself before the pieces land. Her framing throughout: Washington State and Oregon State were burned waiting for someone else to decide their future, and they don't intend to do it twice.

"State assets generally aren't for sale to the highest bidder."Dr. Blake Flanders spent 10 years as President and CEO of the Kansas Board of Regents. He's leaving with a warning about where Division I athletics is headed — and a case for why governing boards need to stop staying out of it.His board governs six state universities. Three compete in Division I: 🏀 University of Kansas 🏀 Kansas State University 🏀 Wichita State UniversityIt also coordinates 19 community colleges, six technical colleges, and Washburn University, and regulates for-profit institutions in the state.Flanders explains why the old hands-off norm made sense, why NIL and revenue sharing broke it, and what actually happens when private equity buys into college sports.Chapters 00:00 – Intro 00:56 – What the Kansas Board of Regents actually oversees 06:11 – From livestock judging coach to system CEO 12:01 – Athletics as the "front porch" 14:46 – Why boards need to be more involved than ever 16:47 – At-will leaders and the evaluation process 19:12 – The policy born from a conference move 23:33 – The KU athletics deficit and the faculty survey 28:40 – Utah's $500M spin-off and Big 12 equity 30:43 – The private equity math: 10–12% returns 32:48 – When a donor becomes an investor 36:15 – What boards should watch for now#CollegeSports #CollegeAthletics #NIL #HigherEd #KansasBoardOfRegents #Big12 #RevenueSharing #PrivateEquity

College sports hits a Congressional crossroad. Five-time university president Gordon Gee joins Karen Weaver to break down the Protect College Sports Act, the Cantwell-Cruz bill racing toward Big Ten and SEC sign-off. Gee calls it "the last, best hope" for reining in runaway spending, delivering antitrust protections, and saving Olympic and women's sports from football's revenue grab—before Washington's involvement becomes the only thing standing between college athletics and total collapse.

My guest has taken one of the most unconventional routes you’ll ever hear about on the way to a university presidency.Bill Johnson is the president of Youngstown State University (OH), capping a career that has spanned military service, business entrepreneurship, and over a decade in the U.S. Congress—a background that uniquely positions him to navigate the turbulence reshaping college sports and higher education. Bill has become one of the most outspoken voices in the country on some of the most controversial issues in NCAA Division I athletics: the impact of massive antitrust legal settlements on mid-major budgets, the explosion of NIL money, the constant churn of the transfer portal, and whether student-athletes should be treated as university employees.In this conversation, we dig into why he believes recent NCAA settlements unfairly punish mid-major programs like Youngstown State, why he’s calling on Congress to set guardrails around NIL and the transfer portal, and how his coalition of non–Power Four conferences is trying to rebalance NCAA governance. We’ll also talk about his evolving view on paying student-athletes, his warnings about turning college sports into a “sub-professional” market, and what he sees as the tipping point that could either save or break the current system.