Duke’s Kevin White won the Sports Business Award for Athletic Director of the Year award after a year that saw both on-field success for the school’s football team, which reached the ACC Championship Game, and off-field influence -- White is one of three ACC ADs on the NCAA TV committee. White in his acceptance speech said, “We’re going through some interesting times in college athletics, that’s perhaps to say the very least. As turbulent as they are, I think we have a great cohort of colleagues. We’re going to find a better day and are working toward that end.” After leaving the stage, White said that he felt he needed to address the upheaval in college sports. White: “To borrow a phrase from the financial community, we’d been in market corrections before. The next iteration will be better, and we’ll figure it out. It’s just a lot of competing interests. It’s a bit of a new frontier. We’ve got an eclectic group of schools in the NCAA, and we couldn’t be more different. It’s a very difficult leadership and management assignment for the parent organization, which is the NCAA.”
