The athletic director's payroll won't sit still

When I moved from lower-level arena football into the Arena Football League, the operations didn't look that different. The scale did.

We were playing in larger venues and taking on more operational overhead, with a product that was very similar in stature and structure to the one I had left. The expenses scaled overnight. The revenue couldn't scale at the same pace, and somebody had to solve for that delta.

What you figure out quickly is that it's not just a sales job anymore. You're creating the inventory as you go. You're finding new ways to engage sponsors and brand partners so you can deliver the value that comes with a higher price tag, the value that makes the business sustainable. You're deciding what to do with ticket prices to cover some of the losses without alienating your audience.

What it feels like is overwhelm. The functions you know, the ones you've grown accustomed to, have scaled overnight. Expenses scaled with them, and revenue just can't.

I think about that a lot when I look at what's on an athletic director's desk right now.

What changed on his desk

You can't talk about how the athletic director's job has changed without talking about pay and the portal, because those are the fundamental changes. But I think the real change sits underneath the headlines. The role has become less about revenue allocation and more about revenue creation. That's the part that has to be reconciled, and it's a job most of the athletic directors who are holdovers from the old model haven't really been able to take on yet.

Picture the AD who has been in the chair through all of it. He isn't only meeting a payroll now. He has to make sure that payroll has some kind of return, and that he isn't losing players out of it because the revenue-sharing piece didn't hold them. In some cases he has to go out and find more dollars on top of his revenue-share number just to fill a competitive roster.

So what's on his desk this month that wasn't there three or four years ago is a set of real overhead numbers with very little stability to them. Players can come and go pretty frequently. He's building strategies to hit a moving target in ways he didn't have to before.

Three pieces of the job, and who set them

Take the job apart and I think three main pieces have changed.

Revenue sharing. This is the one piece that was set from the outside, by the House settlement. The cap on what a school can pay its athletes directly was about $20.5 million in the first year, and it rises 4% a year. This year it's $21.3 million. Ohio State's athletic director, Ross Bjork, said of that number: "We'll max out." In practice it sets a floor and a cap at the same time on what you're willing to spend on talent. The AAC has written the floor into its own rules, with a minimum of $10 million per school over three years.

Inside that number is a balancing act: competing at a level that keeps your financial position sustainable while still being truly competitive in the sport, and making sure a win in the sport lines up with a win for the trustees and the institution. That mechanism didn't exist before. It's a key part of the job.

Roster management. The second piece is player movement. You go raise donor dollars to sign a player. If that player leaves, you have to fill the role again while you go sell new donors on funding the player coming in. It becomes a two-headed monster. You're trying to keep the players satisfied, and you're also trying to keep satisfied the sources of revenue that pay the players. You're navigating movement, you're navigating payroll, and you're navigating the ancillary payroll that funds players above and beyond the revenue-share dollars, all while trying to build a roster that's sustainable.

The donor relationship. Donors have been fatigued by years of normal campaigns and normal asks. Now the pace has accelerated, and departments are going back to the greatest hits of their donor base to fund these decisions and the supplemental pieces that keep a team competitive. You're no longer dealing with donors from a position of surplus. They've become one of your central sources of active revenue, deployed to cover pay, revenue sharing and some of the losses that come with the portal.

You can see it on the record. In April 2025, UConn's athletic director, David Benedict, wrote that the Husky Athletic Fund had averaged 7,328 members and about $10.2 million a year in annual giving over the previous three years, and set a goal to double both donors and dollars over the next three. Double $10.2 million and you get $20.4 million. The first-year revenue-share cap was $20.5 million. The fundraising goal is the cap, restated as a donor target, and the cap it's chasing rises each year.

What I find interesting is where these expectations came from. Only the revenue-sharing piece was set by an outside ruling. The other asks changed from the inside. The department moved the expectation on its own counterparties, and the donor on the other side of that relationship now has to deal with an ask he didn't set.

What's hard to see from the chair

I don't think it's that the AD can't see what's happening. Sometimes ADs are so inundated with the newness of the situation that it's hard to step back from it. That's where pattern recognition from other businesses starts to help, because ultimately this becomes a revenue creation problem.

The numbers point the same way across the industry. In 2023-24, 22 of the 352 Division I programs generated more revenue than they spent, according to the Government Accountability Office. In fiscal 2024, the median department in the richest tier, the Power conferences plus Notre Dame, spent $166.8 million against $149.3 million in total revenue, by the NCAA's own count. That was a full year before revenue sharing began.

So the question is how you create enough sustainable revenue, whether it comes from donors, from the ancillary pieces, from operating the business or from other assets you have available, to reach the revenue-share number and still have enough to fill a competitive roster. Those are all revenue creation pieces.

It's less about the inability to see and more about understanding which resources need to be built inside the department and which can be brought in from outside. It's building a roster of people that meets the moment, as opposed to trying to manipulate and shift the current construction to fit new constraints. It's the same delta I was solving for when the venues got bigger: functions that scaled overnight, and revenue that couldn't keep up.

Where it goes

Three to five years out, I think the institutions that figure out how to reconstruct themselves as revenue-generating, asset-led operations are the ones that take advantage of this moment and come out better positioned. They learn to operate leaner, so the number they have to create against is as low as possible. They make the jump from a donor-driven model to a revenue-driven one, make the headcount changes that requires, and bring in the outside expertise that lets them build brand value, turn that brand value into monetization, and turn the monetization into ancillary revenue that didn't exist before.

Most departments today sit inside more of a governance-built operation. Below the top tier, the department isn't mostly funded by what it earns: in fiscal 2024 the median FCS department took 76% of its revenue from institutional support and student fees, and the median FBS department outside the Power conferences took 62%. The institutions that pull ahead will be the ones that enable their leadership to build new departments that mirror professional sports organizations a lot more than they mirror that structure.

The first move

I think the first move is changing the lens you operate through. Start looking at the institutional assets and the program assets differently: how they can be leveraged and monetized in ways they haven't been. That's the first step in moving an operation that may still look like the old guard of College Football 1.0, and in starting the mindset shift toward College Football 2.0 as more of a commercial enterprise.

Trying to piecemeal it, one step at a time, one change at a time, one hire at a time, costs you the ability to build a structure in the likeness of what needs to be built. So the first step is sitting down and visualizing, based on the asset set you actually have, what structure could make sense, and then reverse-engineering toward it.

—MC

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Sources: GAO-26-108640 (July 2026) · NCAA, Division I Athletics Finances: 10-Year Trends, FY2024 (Dec 2025) · Knight Commission brief on House v. NCAA (Feb 2025) · Ross Bjork via Columbus Dispatch (2026) · AAC announcement via Athletic Business (Mar 2025) · David Benedict, "Fighting On For UConn," UConn Athletics (4 Apr 2025).