Former Duke AD Kevin White assesses ‘toxic’ NCAA and future of college athletics

Having spent a lifetime in college athletics, running high-profile departments at Notre Dame and Duke at his final two stops, Kevin White found himself uniquely positioned to address the current, frenzied and confusing state of college athletics.

Along with teaching a sports business class at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, the 73-year-old White has been writing what has evolved into a book project since his August 2021 retirement as Duke’s athletics director.

On Nov. 17, he joined a Knight Commission panel in Washington, D.C., where college athletics were the topic. With conferences realigning with coast-to-coast membership, players now able to freely transfer and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments creating unregulated free agency, White realized he had the freedom to offer thoughts without professional blowback.

“I was determined to be a ‘truth teller,’“ White said, “and as we often quip within sport, my mission was to disentangle myth from my perceived reality, and as they say, move the pile.”

The truth, in White’s opinion, is college athletics arrived at this confusing, crucial point through its own actions and, too often, inaction.

“In quiet moments, perhaps late at night, I find myself pondering with both total dismay and serious discontent, how college athletics arrived at this highly disjointed place,” White said. “My personal hypothesis suggests that as operators of the collegiate system, we have been horrendous communicators. Moreover, we have been held hostage via our inability to publicly tell the story relative to modern day college athletics; and, in the same breath, the NCAA has become toxic, for highly ineffective communication always tends to breed contempt.”

White included that passage in an essay with his full thoughts on the enterprise that became his life’s work, from an assistant track and field coach position at Central Michigan in 1976 through athletics director jobs at Loras College (Iowa), Maine, Tulane, Arizona State, Notre Dame and Duke. That work landed him in the National Association of Directors of Collegiate Athletics Hall of Fame in its 2022 class.

White shared the essay, in which he calls the current situation as “an arms race to construct the next paradigm/model,” with the News & Observer.

“There is undeniably a need to recreate, perhaps relaunch the NCAA,” White said. “This parent organization needs to become far more contemporary, if not anticipatory, for the world is clearly ever changing.”

Passages from the essay are included below:

Thoughts on the current state of college athletics

“Over my almost four decades as a director of athletics, college athletics has never been at the current level of disarray, a condition of utter helplessness, or despair. The ecosystem is terribly broken, not sustainable, largely fueled by funny money which is activating an artificial market! The pay for play system, known as NIL (Name, Image and Likeness), has served to deregulate the larger enterprise, wherein no rules, regulations, and/or guardrails exist. It should be noted that this level of deregulation does not exist within any professional sports league. College athletics, should all the sitcom players be earnest and honest, would agree the ’functionality’ has now become unhinged, chaotic, and uneven, whereby there are a number of existing lawsuits facing the parent organization.”

Should college athletics separate from academic pursuits?

“The two paramount positions I endeavored to stake out for the Knight Commission were that college athletics needed to remain, in total, very much a part of the Academy, with no carve outs. Secondly, reengaging well-seasoned practitioners within the oversight process was critical.

“Specifically, our 107-year history wherein college athletics has been tethered to American higher education, is our supreme point of difference not just domestically, but globally. Today, this relationship, I would argue, is at risk, and may be heading toward an untenable position. Once again, the august USA system is the envy of the world, for we are at this point the only country in the world that has successfully aligned, if not combined, the school with sport model.”

“As a sub sector in free fall, we need to protect the vital elements, and in the same breath, construct an effective, as well as legally defendable — fair and right — future iteration of college sports.

“In one individual’s anecdotal opinion, arguably without empirical data, it will be the beginning of the end, should college football, men’s college basketball, women’s college basketball, and/or any other segmented part separate from American Higher Education.”

How are changes impacting athletes in sports beyond football?

“It should be fully understood that Team USA (Olympic team) is heavily dependent on the NCAA’s broad based system, for 80% of the able-body USA Team, and around 40% of the Para Team have either competed or trained within the NCAA system. Again, the practitioner community would fully comprehend what legislation, if impacted, would do to the elite USA athlete community.

As a result, it’s terribly fair to suggest that college athletics has done more for gender equality, the advancement of women (generally), as well as for first generation students, than any other social enterprise or institution since the turn of the last century, including the GI Bill.

What should the NCAA’s role be?

“My opinion, not supported by analytics or empirical data, but underscored by my almost 50 years of involvement, suggests to me that the NCAA is very good at conducting championships. Therefore, within a reworked NCAA, further subdivision federation could indeed be facilitated, while enforcement of rules and regulations could be largely outsourced, not unlike the IRS and SafeSport. Moreover, the establishment, and reinterpretation of the rules and regulations could become the daily work of the conferences, while Disney-like storytelling could remain a responsibility of the parent organization. For, in this particular area, we have all failed miserably.

“As I stated to the Commission, I am not legally trained. However, the next iteration needs to be created in a way that history doesn’t repeat itself, a decade from now. Finally, in this regard, my instinct is that all immediate and future opportunities relative to compensating student-athletes, employee status, or collective bargaining, need to be left in the hands of highly capable legal practitioners, and the court system.”

Who should lead college athletics, and who should not

“As I spoke in D.C. on Nov. 17, I freely indicted the greater college athletics enterprise, including myself, for we have unintelligently moved away from practitioner leadership. The code here is that a lot of the permissive, and/or uninformed decisions affecting the future of college athletics have been promulgated by non-practitioners, well intended CEO’s representing higher education, Trustees, benefactors, politicians, the media, and the beat goes on. Truth be told, there is always a supreme interest per dabbling in the proverbial ‘toy store;’ however, college athletics has been led, within the modern area, by individuals who possessed genuine zeal for the ’toy store,’ but lacked an earnest, seasoned aptitude relative to just how all the pieces are aligned, or not.”