Athletic director

Athletic directors can negotiate multimillion-dollar media deals and can manage powerful coaches, who are usually the highest paid employees in the state.

Among the coaches to hold simultaneously hold the AD position were Bear Bryant (Texas A&M and Alabama), Ray Perkins (Alabama), Frank Broyles (Arkansas), Pat Dye (Auburn), Ray Graves (Florida), Wally Butts (Georgia), Vince Dooley (Georgia), Charles Shira (Mississippi State), Bud Wilkinson (Oklahoma), Robert Neyland (Tennessee), Darrell Royal (Texas), Emory Bellard (Texas A&M) and John McKay (USC).

In recent decades, this system has been almost entirely abandoned; collegiate sports, especially in its compliance aspects, has become far too complicated an undertaking to be run on a part-time basis.

Football coach Charles McClendon nearly bolted for Texas A&M when he was offered the combined position of football coach and athletic director by the Aggies in January 1972, but remained in Baton Rouge after successful lobbying by LSU athletic director Carl Maddox and Louisiana Governor John McKeithen.

Paul Dietzel (LSU) and Tom Osborne (Nebraska) coached the football teams at their respective schools to national championships and later came back as athletic director after working elsewhere.

Osborne served three terms in the United States House of Representatives after coaching the Cornhuskers from 1973 through 1997; he returned to Nebraska as AD in 2007.

Additionally, most of the old-line coaches who demanded such total control as a condition of employment have since either retired (or in Dooley's case, forced out) or died (Bryant died four weeks after coaching his final football game at Alabama), leaving in place a new generation who are not desirous of such an arrangement, if it were to be made available, and additionally have developed other sources of income, such as shoe contracts and radio and television appearance fees and endorsement contracts, that make the income which might come from the additional duty of athletic director unnecessary.

The budget for a major athletic department of a large American university is now routinely at the level of tens of millions of dollars; such enterprises demand professional management.