In the past three years, intercollegiate athletics has undergone a structural shift unlike anything in its modern history. Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) compensation has evolved from endorsement deals to revenue sharing. Media-rights contracts in the Power conferences stretch into the billions. Conference realignment reshapes competitive and financial landscapes almost annually. And athletic departments at major public universities now manage nine-figure budgets, complex capital projects and enterprise-level risk.
Yet at most institutions, the title at the top has remained the same.
When the University of South Florida launched its most recent athletics leadership search, the conversation did not begin with branding. It began with governance.
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“As we embarked on this search, it became clear that this moment was different,” said Will Weatherford, chair of the USF Board of Trustees. “Our next leader couldn’t just be an athletics director — we needed a CEO of USF Athletics.”
The distinction, Weatherford said, is substantive.
“The CEO title is a recognition that we are stewarding not just an athletic program, but something that increasingly resembles a professional sports franchise,” he said. “We have student-athletes being compensated not just through NIL but through revenue share. That sounds a lot more like a business than just a not-for-profit organization. So, we should run it like a business.”
Across Division I, many athletics directors already operate as chief executives – overseeing media contracts, donor portfolios, sponsorship strategy, facilities financing, compliance risk and direct athlete compensation models. USF chose to make that evolution explicit and structure for it, adding a chief operating officer and chief business officer alongside its new athletics leader.
That leader is Rob Higgins, a USF alumnus and the longtime executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, where he helped position the region to host two Super Bowls, a College Football Playoff National Championship and multiple NCAA championships. Higgins has managed global-scale events with sprawling economic impact and complex public-private partnerships.
“The college athletics landscape has been ultra dynamic in the last three years specifically,” Higgins said. “The days of just managing sports programs and coaches and overseeing student-athletes are over. Those traditional responsibilities remain. But now you layer in the overarching duty to help manage a major business enterprise — revenue generation, marketing, capital projects. The job has elevated organically. This is more appropriately naming it what it has become.”
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RUNNING ATHLETICS LIKE AN ENTERPRISE
If the transformation was only about compensation models or conference alignment, a traditional structure might suffice. But the cumulative effect of NIL, the transfer portal, expanding media contracts and escalating coaching contracts has altered how athletics functions inside a university.
Michelle Harrolle, who leads USF’s Vinik Sport & Entertainment Management graduate program, describes college athletic departments as “transforming slowly into mini corporations.”
For Harrolle, the shift to something more closely resembling corporate structure is meaningful.
“An athletic director directs. A CEO strategically manages the entire enterprise. Names are perception. Language matters.”
A modernized approach also helps recruit talent across sectors.
In Higgins’ case, it better reflects the complexity of his responsibilities than a more conventional athletic director title can. Weatherford points to his work as chairman of the committee that brought the Super Bowl to Tampa in 2021 alongside Higgins, who served as the committee’s CEO.
For institutions seeking to recruit experienced talent from both collegiate and professional environments, the signal is clear. Athletics is being organized with the same functional rigor applied elsewhere on campus — finance, operations, compliance and strategy — rather than relying on legacy hierarchies.
A GOVERNANCE QUESTION FRAMED AROUND AN ATHLETICS STORY
It would be easy to frame USF’s move as simply an athletics story — a new title, a high-profile hire, a stadium rising on campus for the first time in the university’s 70-year history. But the deeper narrative is about institutional leadership during transformation.
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Across higher education, presidents are confronting structural shifts: demographic cliffs, research competition, evolving workforce demands, technological disruption and financial pressures. Intercollegiate athletics is experiencing its own version of that upheaval. The common thread is not sport. It is governance.
The CEO model is consistent with USF’s recent pattern of structural boldness. For university leaders, the question is less about whether to replicate it and more about whether their own governance structures match the complexity of the moment. Athletics may be the most visible arena where this tension is playing out, but it’s not the only one.
In the end, titles alone don’t transform institutions. Alignment does. Clarity does. The willingness to adjust does.
College sports will continue to evolve. So will higher education more broadly. Institutions that treat these shifts as leadership challenges — rather than public relations challenges — may be best positioned not simply to compete, but to endure.
Learn how the University of South Florida is approaching leadership in this playbook.