Far be it from me to tell my alma mater what it should do, but I’m about to do it anyway.
Louisiana Tech is in need of an athletic director. I’m sure we will hear and read the usual “national search.” The school will probably hire some company and pay many thousands of dollars to come up with a list of names that has been carefully culled and would be perfectly suited. (An athletic version of match.com, if you will).
But I can do all of that for Tech and do it a greatly reduced price.
Tom Burnett.
There you have it. And, being the loyal alum I am, this one’s on me.
To whoever is making this call, if you haven’t hired Burnett to be the next AD by the time you get to the end of this column, you’ve already made your first mistake. (Spoiler alert – this column is not that long, so hurry up and get your cell phone out.)
I’ve known Burnett since the days we spent all night traveling back from Tech road games in Starkville in the late 1980s, but he is best known as the recently retired commissioner of the Southland Conference. He did that for 19 years and do you know whose place he took when he became Southland Commissioner? Greg Sankey, now the head dude of a little outfit they like to call the Southeastern Conference.
Burnett was also with the Sun Belt Conference for 11 years not long after he graduated from Tech, so he knows how college athletics need to be run. There are a lot of other details to his resume (councils, committees, task forces, yada yada) but here’s all you need to know – he was the head cheese of the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
He’s the guy who went on national television and had to explain to CBS why Oklahoma and Texas A&M didn’t get in. He’s the guy who was standing up there with Jim Nantz and handing the trophy to Bill Self and the Kansas Jayhawks in the Superdome.
You’re telling me that guy isn’t qualified to be athletic director at Louisiana Tech?
Let me let you in on a little secret. It wasn’t that long ago that Tech had an athletic director who called them “dugins” instead of dugouts at a baseball field.
That’s the definition of a low bar.
But there is a far bigger issue at play here for Tech athletics and it is the biggest reason why Burnett is the right/only call.
When Tech made the major college football move in the late 1980s, it had a plan. Some laughed at the idea, but the Bulldogs put their collective heads down and went for it. It was rough seas for a while, but it proved to be successful. Maybe not across the board, but it was far more positive than negative. The athletic program began to grow.
No, it wasn’t Texas or Ohio State, but it wasn’t what it once was either.
But when the conference re-alignment started taking place at the Group of Five level, it was as if Tech had no plan whatsoever and seemed totally unprepared. Where once they were leaders, now they were followers … and didn’t seem to know who to follow.
The Bulldogs are in Conference USA, where the closest school is 260 miles away. The second closest is 462 miles away. Nice natural rivalries there, huh? Half of Tech’s conference opponents are more than 850 miles away.
Road trip!
Yes, it should have never happened this way, but it did. Now it’s time to get that fixed. Someone who can navigate through it all.
Someone who has a plan in place when the next shoe drops.
Someone who is plugged in to college athletics across the country.
Someone who is not looking for their next job.
What has happened in Ruston is that the athletic director position has become somewhat transitory. Hire a guy no one’s ever heard of, followed by lots of handshaking and rope-learning, hiring a head coach or two, saying all the right things when asked and then take off after a few years for a junior AD job at a bigger school.
Not counting Jim Oakes (who was AD for 14 years), do you care to guess the average length of stay by the other 11 Tech athletic directors since 1978? That would be 2.7 years.
Here’s the irony. Burnett probably wouldn’t even need to stay 2.7 years at his alma mater. Nor would he probably even want to. He could get done what needs to get done and then hand it off to someone who could pick it up and run with it. Kind of like Greg Sankey did with Burnett two decades ago.
Hey Tech, have you made that phone call yet?
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com