Canzano: "This has become a billionaire's playground"
Washington AD Pat Chun sounds off on college sports.
University of Washington Athletic Director Pat Chun said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday.
“We’re overleveraged in this environment by agents. We’re overleveraged by rumors, and we’re overleveraged because everybody recognizes the need to win in football. There’s no restraint. This has become a billionaire’s playground,” Chun said.
The Huskies AD spoke with me in a wide-ranging 1-on-1 interview on the “BFT Unfiltered” show.
We talked about the saga involving UW quarterback Demond Williams, Jr., the trajectory of Jedd Fisch’s football program, the challenge of competing in the Big Ten, legislation aimed at saving college sports, and the Washington rivalry with Oregon.
Chun on the Oregon-UW rivalry:
“A true rival brings out the best in you. So I’ll just say this: from a Washington standpoint, we’re fortunate to have a rivalry that brings out the best in us. We’re very different than Oregon on so many different levels. We don’t want to try to be Oregon. The best thing about a rivalry, and why rivalries matter so much, is that they bring out the best in each other. We recognize what they have as an advantage, and we’ve got to try to figure out what our advantages are at UW.”
Chun on QB Demond Williams, Jr., announcing he was transferring, then backtracking after last season:
“It’s like anything in life. I remind anybody that we’re still in the business of using sports to teach life lessons, and this is a great laboratory for young people to figure out who they are, what their purpose on this planet is and where they’re supposed to get to. I think as we head into this fall, just seeing how he’s behaved and how he’s grown up, he’s still 19-20 right now. I think it’s going to be one of the great learning lessons of Demond’s life, and I think it will help him grow up, too.”
Chun on the legislation in front of Congress that aims to save college sports:
“If we can get to that place, hopefully you can get the support to happen. I think we all recognize the challenge of getting anything passed through Congress. It was always going to be a challenge, and I think this thing is going to be a challenge today because it does not answer questions that are specific to the Big Ten.”
Chun on the tiers forming in college athletics:
“There’s always been a gap between the top and the bottom for the last hundred years of college sports. I do believe there needs to be, for the overall health of college sports, there needs to be there needs to be rules and regulations. There still needs to be some type of mechanism and environment that, you know, other than spending the most money on the best players, there has to be something in which coaching makes a huge difference, in which you can mitigate some of the differences.
“I think where we’re headed right now, it feels like if you want to be a monster program, it’s just going to take dollars. And you know, for a school like Washington, I mean, we’re out there constantly looking for new dollars to add to our budget.”
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
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He said a whole lot of nothing.
I stopped reading when I came across something about their rivalry being with Oregon. It was early in the article.