Wake Forest AD: “It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times”

John Curry is the Athletic Director at Wake Forest and he joins us on the Adam Gold show. Man, there's nothing going on right now in intercollegiate athletics. I know the football season is gonna start in like 10 days for week zero. I still don't know why we call it week zero.

It should be week one. We don't have to have a lot of games in week one, but I'm just gonna open this up very broadly for you, sir. How would you characterize the landscape of college, it's really college football, I almost feel like like I'm lying by calling it college sports because I think everything is being done for football.

How would you characterize the landscape of college football today? Hey, you know Adam, I was talking with Coach Colosseum this morning and I said it's the best of times, it's the worst of times, you know, because if you think about, you know, even the popularity of college football, you know, Wake Forest is having an unbelievable, we're off to an unbelievable start. We're gonna have a sold-out home opener in a couple weeks. I know many of our other ACC schools are announcing record sales of tickets and all that kind of stuff. You know, right here in Winston-Salem, today is a massive day for us. We got our home opener of our women's soccer program, which has been a perennial NCAA contender. We're opening the McCreary football complex, which is a 38 million dollar, completely privately funded, no debt, even got a maintenance reserve in there, which is pretty unusual, which is the latest piece of what is 250 million dollars in athletic facility construction and improvements at Wake Forest over the last 10 years and we're announcing, we got a major announcement coming today about a pretty significant project for all of the city of Winston-Salem. So it's good for, you are painting a great picture for Wake Forest. Now, big picture that for me.

What are we, what are we looking at today? Well, overall, I mean, I, you know, if you look at it from a national perspective, again, the experience that is provided and the investment into operating, we talk about world-class student athlete experience, I mean, it's the best it's ever been, right? But there's also this set of incredible, seemingly existential, existential convergence of factors, whether it's, you know, some of the legal challenges that the enterprise faces, you know, obviously, the Congress alignment and national conferences, which seems to be the evolution that we're experiencing, you know, that causes disruption. And then, you know, there's other issues, including, you know, the pressures on higher education. And then underpinning this is, you know, I thought it was really interesting, the article that Washington State President Kirk Schulz did last week with Pete Famel talking about, you know, the media rights opportunities that they may have had last fall. Hey, we're in a moment of time in the media rights industry where it's completely disrupted there. You know, you can't go another day about reading about, you know, you know, whether it's, you know, Netflix or all these different, you know, media, I mean, the pressure on the media business in general is massive right now. And, you know, sometimes I think that, you know, we might get a little compartmentalized in college sports to think that we're the only issue in the whole world.

And we're the only issue in the whole world. And we're in a very dynamic time. John Currie is the director of athletics at Wake Forest and is joining us on the Adam Gold Show. To the, I call it conference cannibalism because that's really what it seems like to me. I was watching a, or listening, you could do both, watching a podcast, a friend of mine does a sports media podcast, and Brett Yormark, the Big 12 commissioner, was talking about having just had a conversation with PAC-12 commissioner George Klyavkov, and he apologized for basically annexing a third of what the PAC-12 used to be. And he said, but we had to do that. We had to add those four schools. I don't know if it's just me and my idealism, but I feel like there should be a difference between need and want. Because I'm not really sure what they did makes them any better.

It just makes them bigger. Do you get, what do you think about stuff like that? Well, you know, as we've talked about before, Adam, I mean I grew up in Chapel Hill on Tobacco Road, and you know, we had, when I was a little kid, we had seven schools in the ACC. And, you know, in the 80s when I was, you know, going to all those games and, and, you know, I was there when Wake Forest beat North Carolina in 1982 in Chapel Hill at Carl Michael Auditorium, even though if I had to saw the truth serum, I was probably sad about that at the time.

I'm now very proud of that moment and being there, but I wish I had the ticket stuff somewhere, right? So I'd love it to be like that, you know. I'd love to play everybody, you know, twice in a 14-game conference regular season and watch every single game on, you know, sale with the pilot and, you know, all that kind of stuff and know the rosters of every single one of the seven ACC teams in basketball and know who the starting quarterback was.

I'd love for it to be like that again, but it's not going to be like that again. So part of, I think, what Commissioner Iormark was talking about in that interview is, you know, reality is reality, and reality over the last 40 years in college athletics has been consolidation. And there's a lot of different factors, you know, as you know, I've been able to teach a class at Columbia the last five years.

I didn't teach it this year, thank goodness, because I couldn't have taught it during the June when we were in the College of World Series. But, you know, we talk about the history of college athletics and the slide shows reality is reality. We're in a period of consolidation and we're fortunate and because of leadership decisions that the ACC is one of the leading conferences and the decisions that the ACC made over the last 30 years under, you know, Commissioner Corrigan and the Commissioner Swafford and now under Jim Phillips, his leadership, we had a great conference. We got the best collection of academic schools in the country. We've got vibrant markets. I mean, if you look at the state of North Carolina with our four big four schools, this is the, you know, number one state in the country for business. According to CNBC, we got all this commerce. We got, you know, some great cities and blah blah blah. So we're really fortunate in that regard and I think all of us want the ACC to continue to be, as further evolution comes down the road, to continue to be one of the leading conferences in America. To that end though, the public perception is that it's a league that, you know, everybody's looking for life boats. Florida State, you know, not thinly veiled, threatened to leave.

They obviously missed the deadline Tuesday. But, I mean, the television contract and the grant of rights extends for another 13 years and we all expect them to do something at some point. So what do you make of the unrest and this lust for money? Well, lust for money is, you know, that's kind of the tail end of your question. You know, clearly the resources, the need for resources has expanded. You know, a good sports economist can talk about whether the need for resources has evolved faster or at the same rate as availability of resources, right?

So back to your needs and wants type thing. The reality of what, for whatever it is, the competition for coaching, talent, facilities, you know, I think about the fact that at Wake Forest we've gone from 11 athletic trainers in 2019 to now we got 17 or 18 athletic trainers and we got this many more nutritionists and we got this many more strength and conditioning coaches because safety is our number one priority, right? And that calls for more money. So there are reasons in terms of, you know, the ACC, you know, we had our, I can't remember if it's bi-weekly or every weekly, we talk all the time, ACC AD meeting yesterday and we talked about all kinds of things, you know, we talked about expansion, we talked about, you know, different stuff but we also talked about the fact we got seasons coming up and we got a great league and we're going to have great exposure and big-time games, you know, we got five ACC games on the opening weekend, excuse me, five days of ACC football on the opening weekend which is a great opportunity and we have great relationships. You know, coming out of the meeting in Amelia Island, Commissioner Phillips I thought really articulated the fact that every school is under pressure, right? Every school is under pressure at all different levels in the school. It's not just in athletics, it's really a whole higher education model, right? Every school is under pressure.

Pressure at different schools manifests itself in different ways. I truly believe that we continue to have constructive and open transparent dialogue about how to make our league stronger. Sometimes there's different perspectives of it just like any other family but at the end of the day, you know, we've got a lot of great advantages in the ACC. John Currie, Director of Athletics at Wake Forest is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show. So most recently, I know it wasn't necessarily a vote, maybe it was a straw poll, maybe it was just ayes versus nays but there was the potential of adding Stanford, Cal, maybe even SMU to the mix.

So it's been widely reported about the four schools that were definitely against it without maybe tipping your hand, John Currie, not that you had to vote, but what are the reasons to support Cal, Stanford, and or SMU as ACC members? Well, one of the things you just said that's really wise, Adam, is that the athletic directors are not the ones that ultimately make these decisions, right? Athletic directors are really strategic advisors and operators and we advise our presidents on our individual campuses.

We have a tremendous president at Wake Forest, Dr. Susan Wintey, who's providing great leadership as a member of the Executive Committee of the ACC. And so that's really our role, or the defined role that is assigned to us. You know, there's, as you can imagine, there's really good advantages and disadvantages for any decision one might make. You're also in a decision paradigm where, you know, there's options that may be options today that weren't options yesterday, or maybe options tomorrow that aren't options today. So as you try to juggle all those things, you can imagine to have, you know, 15 schools to think about it exactly the same way. When you have, you know, 15 presidents and 15 ADs and 15 Chairmen of the Board of Trustees and 15 SWAs, you know, that's not an easy thing. And in a lot of ways, that's a good thing to have, you know, that you're not going to make rash decisions that you regret down the road or feel like you didn't have enough thought. But it is a balance of being able to make decisions in the time frame that the opportunities exist. And that will be a perpetual challenge of any enterprise.

All right, so I just want to clarify this. Can you come up with no positives to add these schools, like getting into the state of California in terms of, you know, all games, getting into the state of Texas, all games, or are the logistical, you know, is the logistical downside too much of a detriment? I'm just, you don't have a, you don't personally have a vote, but do you have an opinion on whether or not that would be good for the league?

Well, I think there's lots of, there's lots of advantages, and then there's some optical and real challenges that you would have to overcome any time you've expanded, right? You know, in the state of North Carolina, we're spoiled, right? We're spoiled because, since 1953, you know, we've gotten in our car or on a bus and driven, you know, 30 minutes or 15 minutes or an hour and a half away to a ballgame. And, you know, if you go back to, you know, Boston College and University of Miami and Notre Dame and Syracuse, they're flying to every single contest, right? So, we have a bit of a, you know, we're just spoiled here, you know?

I mean, heck, that's one of the reasons that makes the state of North Carolina such an awesome place to live, right? As we have this density and vibrancy, but we also have, you know, beautiful open spaces too, I should say. So, there are some challenges to logistics.

There's also some, you know, reality. And then, you mentioned things, you know, if you think about the markets, and when I say market, I don't just mean a place to go sell stuff, right? I also mean about, you know, where we have 15 institutions, you know, Wake Forest, you know, we had like, you know, we had 18,000 applications for 1375 spots. We've got a problem with too many places, too many people for the, that want to come here that we just are, that we can't accommodate right now. But, you know, the fundamental thing that universities do is educate students, right? And you also have universities that need to fill their beds and need to have students to educate.

And that's a long-term pipeline thing, right? And then you think about where our graduates might go to work, or how we partner with science and industry to help develop our economies. And so, you think about the ACC represents a bunch of, you know, 10 incredible states and growth states in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Boston, and New York. I mean, that's all growth stuff and knitting together of incredible universities, right? So, if you think about markets, like the ones you've talked about, whether it's DFW or Northern California, Silicon Valley, you know, you think about, you know, a closer time between the RTP and Silicon Valley, that's pretty good thing, right? But you do have to factor in, you know, as we talk about student athlete experience, you know, how does, how do you, how is that a win for student athletes, right? I think student athletes at some of those schools probably think they want to be in the power five and being in a, being in a league if the Pac-12 is not going to exist, being in a league like the, like the SEC, or like the Big Ten, or like the ACC would be pretty awesome.

And, but, you know, it does require some other offsets that you have to manage around. Two quick things before we let John Curry go. You've been very generous with your time, and you always are, and I appreciate that.

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Panthers Playbook, download and subscribe today at wrelsportsfan.com or wherever you discover your favorite podcasts. Well, the, the advantage that the ACC has with some people frequently, you know, want to malign as a disadvantage. The advantage that we have is we do have a long-term contract with the worldwide leader in sports, ESPN that goes through 2036. And we do have 15 institutions, and we do have a nationally distributed linear network, the ACC network, of which ACC and ESPN are 50-50 partner. You know, we do have the most national championships last year, including, you know, Wake Forest 10th.

Wake Forest is one of seven schools in the ACC to win 10 national championships, along with, you know, North Carolina, Duke, Virginia, Notre Dame, Florida State, and Syracuse. So, we do have tons of advantages, and so we don't have to do anything. And, and so that's an advantage. The, the, you know, on the other side, you know, we've made strategic decisions that ended up ultimately being advantageous decisions. And, you know, I think you're talking about, Brett, your mark a few, earlier in the show, I mean, that the Big Ten, I mean, the Big Ten didn't have to expand when they expanded three years ago, but they did.

And it was a good thing for them. History has shown that consolidation happens. And, you know, so you could see advantages to that with, with, with adding schools to what is already a great league. But I think all of us are united in the fact that when we make decisions, we really want to make decisions with the best possible information that, that do advance the overall cause of strengthening the ACC. Would it help the ACC if men's golf was a major, and women's golf, just golf in general, were a major television property for the Atlantic Coast Conference? Because it seems like all of your golfers are either playing professional or challenging for amateur titles.

It is an incredible, incredible run. And we all know the advertisers love golf. Well, hey, you know, one of the reasons that Wake Forest is the fastest growing fan base in the country, you know, the fastest growing fan base in the Power Five, the fastest growing fan base in the ACC, 2.7 million fans. We're about 25,000 fans behind NC State. We're about 50,000 fans ahead of Virginia Tech.

But one of the reasons is because of broad best success. And to your point, there is visibility in golf. You know, our women's golf was, you know, won the national championship. I've had people from all over the country told me about how they watched it and that aren't affiliated with Wake Forest.

They watched it on the Golf Channel. That was a decision made to grow the exposure to college, to men's and women's college golf with the Greyhawk championships, you know, just like baseball. I mean, Wake Forest was in the baseball in the College World Series. And, you know, our games, we had over 6 million people watch those games, you know, 2 million people, 2.1 million people for the classic against LSU, which unfortunately we ran out of time on. But I'm going to tell, I have a meeting with Jerry Haas right now who was won the ACC championship in 2022.

And then we had an individual win the ACC men's championship this year. My next meeting is with Jerry Haas. And so I'm going to tell him that you asked about that. I mean, they're all over the place.

Cam Young, Will Zalatoris, Alex Fitzpatrick, who played so well at the Oatman championship this year. John Curry, I appreciate your time always, sir. Be well. I will see you soon. Thanks, Adam. Go Deacs. Go ACC.