As Oliver Luck walked through the lobby of the Marco Island Hilton, an athletic director from the ACC reached out to shake his hand.
“There goes the savior of the NCAA,” the AD said to Luck, with a laugh.
Luck shrugged off the line as a joke, but there was a thread of truth hidden in the lining.
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“If I’m an athletic director and I’ve got these new expenses coming down the pike, where am I going to find that money?”
OLIVER LUCK
EVP for regulatory affairs, NCAA
Photo by: MARC BRYAN-BROWN
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During Luck’s brief stay at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics meetings last week on Florida’s Gulf Coast, those types of encounters were not uncommon.
ADs finally feel like there’s one of their own inside the halls of the NCAA.
“Over the last 10 to 15 years, the ADs believe their voice hasn’t been quite as loud on policy matters as it should be,” said Luck, the former AD at West Virginia who joined the NCAA last month as executive vice president for regulatory affairs. “I think they’re excited there’s an AD in this new position, whether it’s me or somebody else, who understands how campus life operates. There really hasn’t been that component in the past at the NCAA.”
His new appointment to the Indianapolis-based governing body of collegiate athletics already has made Luck an early favorite to be one of the most compelling figures to watch in college sports this year, mostly because of the respect he garnered in six years with the Mountaineers.
Luck was seen by his AD peers as an out-of-the-box thinker whose experience as a high-ranking executive with NFL Europe and Major League Soccer was welcomed in the college sector.
Whether he will be the savior of the oft-criticized NCAA, however, remains to be seen. But he certainly doesn’t see himself in that role, even though persistent reports have pegged him as the heir apparent to NCAA President Mark Emmert.
“I believe, despite all of the Cassandra warnings to the contrary, that our business is in pretty good shape,” Luck said. “We have a very robust, very healthy, multibillion-dollar business. TV ratings for [the College Football Playoff] were off the chart. I don’t think we thump our chests nearly enough about just how good we have it.”
Luck’s first day on the job came during the NCAA convention in January. It was a whirlwind of meetings with ADs and campus presidents from Divisions I, II and III.
Then he was off to the NACDA midwinter meetings at Marco Island in southwest Florida. At lunch inside the oceanfront Hilton, Luck, dressed leisurely in a Team USA polo shirt, bounced from one table to another to talk casually with ADs from all over the country, each of them wanting to offer congratulations on the new gig, while also picking his brain on the challenges of the day.
A STROKE OF LUCK
More from the NCAA’s Oliver Luck:
■ “This is an exciting time to be an AD. We’re not in a crisis, but we do have some turmoil and there’s going to be change.”
■ “My personal belief is that the American public cares more about our players being students. Education has to be the core. They have to go to class, they have to be given every opportunity to go through school and graduate. That’s who we are. I think the public cares about that. I think the public cares a little less about some sort of compensation.”
■ “I know how to be a backup quarterback,” a reference Luck uses to dispute reports that he’s the heir apparent to NCAA President Mark Emmert. Luck spent five years in the NFL, from 1982 to 1986, mostly as Warren Moon’s backup with the Houston Oilers.
■ “Well, everybody says, ‘You’re going to Indianapolis to be closer to your son.’ And that’s great, but he’s only there half the year and the rest of the time he’s off enjoying his offseason. What pushed me toward wanting to do this was the opportunity to help promote all of the good things about college athletics. If the job were still in Overland Park, Kan., (the NCAA’s former headquarters) I still would have taken it, no question.”
— Compiled by Michael Smith
After lunch, Luck spent an hour standing in front of more than 100 college administrators outlining his three priorities — full cost of attendance, threatening legal cases, and the future viability of Olympic sports.
Those three items, each of which has the capability of severely affecting an athletic department budget, are where Luck initially will focus his energy.
Here’s how Luck approached those priorities with his audience of ADs:
■ He spoke at length about implementing full cost of attendance and the possibility of an additional $5,000 trust fund for scholarship athletes, based on the ruling in the O’Bannon case. The NCAA is appealing the trust payment.
Luck warned administrators to tread cautiously on paying full cost of attendance, a measure that was passed at the convention. Cost of attendance permits schools to pay scholarship athletes anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 a year, based on each school’s federally mandated number, to cover expenses beyond tuition, books, room and board.
Most of the power five schools will implement the new stipend to their athletes as it becomes available in 2015, but schools in less favorable financial positions might opt to pay 50 percent or some other amount at first. Full-cost-of-attendance stipends are projected to cost athletic departments an additional $800,000 to $1 million a year.
“You may want to err on the side of caution because you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” Luck said of those expenses. “Maybe you don’t go out with 100 percent of the full cost. You might exercise some restraint there.”
Within Luck’s message was a bit of a warning. The NCAA is not going to tell schools how to implement the payments. Full cost of attendance, a federally mandated figure that each school’s financial aid office determines, is going to vary from campus to campus.
“I’m not sure, to be very honest, that we want to get involved with policing full-cost-of-attendance issues,” Luck said. “It’s an issue every athletic department has to deal with through their financial aid office. ‘What kids get, what teams get’ … there’s a whole host of things that are very specific to the campus, and I think it’s very important that those decisions get made on campus. So there’s going to be some pushback on those requests.”
In other words, if a school’s stipend is $1,000 less than its rival, the NCAA isn’t going to come in and level the payouts.
If the NCAA’s appeal doesn’t prevail in the O’Bannon case, schools also might have to establish $5,000-a-year trust funds for athletes, in addition to the stipend. Luck warned that these payments to athletes could become politically dicey on campuses where the faculty hasn’t received a raise in recent years.
“We all need to make sure we communicate as much as you can and as often as you can with all of the constituencies across campus so they understand this issue,” he said.
■ Lastly, Luck said, “I’m worried about Olympic sports.”
As expenses mount and ADs look for ways to provide more athlete benefits, especially in football and basketball, Olympic sports could be threatened.
“If I’m an athletic director and I’ve got these new expenses coming down the pike, where am I going to find that money?” he said. “It’s one thing if you’re raising money for a new team meeting room or a new gymnasium. It’s another thing to ask for money to pay a stipend to student athletes. And you can’t really ask students to pay higher fees so you can pay the athletes more.
“So it’s a real challenge to find that money, and my fear is that the sports at the bottom end of the food chain are going to be affected. I’m concerned about Olympic sports when we’re in the throes of economic difficulties.”
Curbing costs by creating more regionalized scheduling, need-based scholarships and possibly realigned conferences are all ideas that will be considered for Olympic sports.
“If Olympic sports wind up on the chopping block, I think we’ll get just crushed by the American public,” Luck said. “We’ll be criticized, and rightfully so, for not protecting the purer side of amateurism.”
