Canzano: Washington State President Kirk Schulz speaks out in 1-on-1
Pac-12 rebuild timeline, Apple Cup, WSU... and his decision to retire.
Washington State President Kirk Schulz will retire in June of 2025. The Pac-12 Conference remains in an existential crisis, tasked with a two-year rebuild. And earlier this week, Schulz promoted a long-time lieutenant to be his permanent athletic director.
I sat down with Schulz for a wide-ranging 1-on-1 conversation. We discussed his decision to retire, the future of the Pac-12, and the timeline for Washington State and Oregon State to pick a path. (Hint: Schulz is against slow-playing it.)
We also spoke about the growing power of the Big Ten and SEC, his decision to hire Anne McCoy as AD, and why Schulz wanted to continue to play the Apple Cup series against Washington.
What went into your thinking when you decided it was time to leave Washington State and announce your retirement?
Kirk Schulz: I started talking with the Board of Regents a year prior to my announcement. I just kind of felt it had been enough. I think 9-10 years in a single presidency is a lot. And so in talking to my wife, my children, and everything — actually, my children, probably more so than anybody else. They were like, ‘Hey, Dad, You’ve taken your annual beating on virtually everything. Maybe it’s time for you to think about doing something else.’
I think you have those conversations with people, and you start evaluating how much longer you want to do it. I’ve always said I wanted people where I worked to say, I wish he stayed a year longer, not he stayed a year too long. I really felt that nine years was going to be about right.
I think the campus will be ready for somebody with some different perspectives. But it’s also given me enough time to allow me to do a lot of the things that I hope to be able to do and see some of the big projects through. So you add all that together, it just felt like the right time. I wanted to give the board plenty of time to do a real national search and go recruit the next candidate, not just sift through resumes because they had to do it in six months. I wanted to take a really mindful approach because, as you probably saw, the two Oregon universities have gone through some abrupt presidential changes. It’s hard to keep the momentum moving at an institution if you’re just constantly pulling one leader in and out. That stability piece I thought was really, really important as well. I’m not interested in being a president anywhere else. If I were, I’d just stay at WSU. I think after two presidencies, it’s enough, and look forward to handing the reins off to my successor and helping them be successful at WSU without interfering. That’s where I am.
The Pac-12 had a lot of presidential turnover during the failed media rights negotiations. Oregon had two presidents and two interim presidents on the job in less than a year. Oregon State hired a new president, too. There was turnover at several other schools, too. Looking back, do you think the turnover played a role in the flow of the TV rights negotiation, or does the Pac-12 end up in the same place anyway?
I think we probably end up in the same place anyway. You’ve written extensively about the reasons for the Pac-12 breakup and all those things. I think the hubris of a lot of the presidents on overvaluing ourselves in the marketplace did more damage to us in the last three years than anything else. But I don’t think the turnover really affected us that much.
The President of the United States will sometimes leave a letter in the Oval Office for the successor. What would you write to your successor at Washington State? What advice would you give?
My advice would be to dive in and get to know the people, the culture of the place, the different campuses, the state, Pacific Northwest, before making lots of decisions. I think sometimes presidents come in and feel they’ve got to show that they’re decisive in the first six months by making critical decisions. My advice is always to spend time getting to know everybody and everything. Talk to some people before jumping in and making all kinds of big decisions that you might later regret.
Your question makes me think about the advice I got from a mentor who was President of Virginia Tech years ago. It’s important for the president to have a working relationship with the men’s basketball coach and the football coach. I got that advice 15 years ago, and it’s still just as valid today as it was back then. Presidents can no longer distance themselves from the athletic enterprise the way maybe they could have 10 years ago. If a president is not willing to wade in, I think that’s going to be really tough. That would be the two things — get engaged with athletics and give yourself time to get to know a place before making decisions.
The Big Ten and SEC are in an obvious position of power right now, particularly in college football. Mike Aresco, the recently retired American Athletic Conference commissioner, described it as “Darwinian” how those two conferences exerted their leverage during the College Football Playoff negotiations. How healthy is the SEC/Big Ten power dynamic for the college sports ecosystem?
If I go back 10 years ago, I think we had commissioners who were seen as leaders at all the conferences. But at the end of the day, (the commissioner) would go back to the Big Ten or the SEC or the Pac-12 and there would be presidents that you would say, ‘OK, they are the real influential decision decision-makers here.’ At the end of the day, they’re going to sit down with the commissioner, and that’s the way it’s going to go.
Clearly, USC played a major role in decision-making in the Pac-12 for years. Within the Big Ten, certainly, Michigan and Ohio State traditionally have played an outsized role in decision-making in those conferences, that type of thing. I watched that shift over the last five years. Now, commissioners are really running things and they consult with presidents. Whether that’s good or not, I think, can be argued. But I do think we’re just in a different world where we’ve got commissioners running athletics and the presidents have taken a step back and frankly have been unwilling, generally, to be engaged at the level they need to until it’s too late.
Once all this stuff went down with the playoff and with the unequal distributions between the conferences and stuff like that, a few presidents are going, ‘Well, this isn't the way we want to do things.’ It’s like, where were you a year ago?!? And so I really think that we’ve watched that shift.
If you look at the last decade in terms of football and who has won national championships, part of the lack of competitiveness from some of the other conferences contributed a lot to the Big Ten and the SEC. We saw a rise in terms of television rights and how many people want to watch Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State play football every Saturday vs. Pac-12 schools or Big 12 schools. I think the lack of other schools winning national championships also contributed to the fact that you’ve really got two leagues that are winning all of them, and getting the best players. Until somebody can break into that club, I think we’re going to continue to see this disproportionate functionality between the conferences.
Do you think the growing gap can be bridged?
The question becomes what fans do and how the fans react. Over time, I think if I went to a particular school and we won a bunch of championships, you might say, ‘Hey, this is the greatest thing ever.’ Well, everybody else goes, ‘Well, no, it’s not. We want our opportunity.’
Do we get 10 years down the road and we’ve seen four different schools — and that’s it — win a football national championship? Or do we see others that break in there, win a national championship, and you start seeing a little a bit more parity? It’s been hard for Washington State for decades to compete against Ohio State or Texas in terms of budget and those things. I worry about those gaps continuing to get so large that you worry if you ever have a chance of fielding that special team like the Cougar Rose Bowl team? Or the Gardner Minshew team we had a few years ago, where everything aligns for you in a season and you go out there and you have a great year? We worry if there will be stories that capture America and sports fans everywhere? Or is it the same schools winning every year all the time?
I’m hopeful and optimistic that we will see the Cinderella stories continue to be there, but I just think it’s going to become more and more difficult as the money becomes an even greater influence than it has been in the last 20 years.
The Pac-12 has options: A) rebuild the conference to an NCAA minimum of eight teams; or B) root for chaos in the ecosystem and try to benefit from another round of realignment; or C) merge with another conference. How do you approach that intersection? Especially with one year to go in your tenure.
Yeah, John, we’re looking at all of the above. I think if you said, ‘Kirk, have you red-lined any of the options right now — any realistic option?’ Let me put it that way, I would say no… right now, our perspective is to keep ourselves flexible, make sure we don’t tie ourselves to something too quickly, whatever that may look like, and do an assessment then of the different options… to figure out which one seems politically the best as well as the one that’s going to provide Washington State with the best ability to compete and win conference championships.
I’m very committed to ensuring that we have a really great Division I conference — an all-sports conference — on the West Coast. I know some of the premier schools are in Midwest-based or East Coast-based conferences. But at the end of the day, I think the West Coast is going to want a premier conference. Now, does that look like some merger or whatever? I don’t know yet. But I do think that’s still really important to me and I think it’s important to some of my colleagues on the West Coast.
As you can imagine, lots of egos get in the way. We’ve got to be really careful about how we message. I think when we came out of the gate a year ago, there was a little bit of, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go cherry-pick whatever schools we want and everybody’s going to come running.’ I think we found out that we were behaving in a way that people said, ‘Hey, what was just done to you two schools… now you’re talking about doing the same to everybody else and it’s OK?!?’ I think we took a step backward and said, ‘Hey, let’s talk about maybe partnerships instead of acquisition.’
What does the timeline for the Pac-12 look like in your mind?
I feel that in my conversations with (President) Jayathi Murthy at Oregon State, I think early in 2025, we’ve got to make a decision about where we’re going to be for the next four or five years. I don’t think we can continue having a foot in multiple conferences and hoping that something’s going to come our way. So I think we’re going to spend the fall planning, looking at our best options. And I think January-February, we’ve got to pick what we think is the best and aggressively move forward.
So that’s where we are in the timeline.
I know that supposedly we have more time than that with the NCAA and those things, but if we’re not careful, we’re going to keep kicking the can down the road. It’ll hurt recruiting, hurt coach retention, hurt our student-athletes. They want to know who they’re going to be competing against. And so that’s the timeline, at least I feel, is important for us to hold to.
I’ve written a lot about the $255 million war chest available to the two Pac-12 schools. I’m curious how you’ll use the money. Will you subsidize what media-rights money you would have normally received as a Power 5 member? Will you set aside money for exit fees, acquisitions, or “partnerships” as you call it?
You know, I think a little bit of that’s still up in the air, John. We reduced our athletics budget this last year by about $10 million to $11 million. And that is painful as hell. We let people go who worked for us for 30 years. I mean, it was not an easy set of decisions to make. The reason I bring that up is you’ve got really two choices here. You can say we’re going to use some of those dollars, the majority of those dollars, to ensure that Washington State and Oregon State get the same (TV distributions) we would have gotten from media rights and not 20 percent of what we would have gotten from media rights. I think at least for the next two years, we’re looking at the conference providing a reasonable subsidy coming back to each institution from that war chest to help us preserve our competitive budget and … give ourselves time for that last question about where are we going to be and what that’s going to look like.
I think that has been the approach much, much more so than, ‘Hey, let's sit on a huge bunch of money that we're going to go use to buy schools.’
I think cutting our athletic budget by $30 million so we can go buy somebody else, I think what would happen is people would say, ‘Well, Kirk, that’s great, but you just gutted us forever. Maybe that was too hasty a decision.’ So I know everybody looks and says, ‘Oh, you got all this money.’ But if you start looking at the media for the two schools over a couple of years, some of the legal stuff coming down the road, the need to keep a small conference office there, fees that we do have to pay to the Mountain West and other places to participate, you can burn through it pretty quickly. And we just want to make sure that we’re preserving some of those dollars for the future, but that we’re maintaining as much as possible the excellence we have in our programs right now.
How important is it for the Pac-12 to stay nimble or lean in terms of the number of future conference members? Scott Barnes, the athletic director at Oregon State, told me he thought the number of teams should be on the right around eight or so. Is that strategy still in play, or is that to be determined as you sort things out?
I think there’s no question that we’re going to try and keep as nimble as possible. And I think you’ve written about this in the past. I mean, we’re watching what happens on the East Coast with the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Clemson and Florida State, lawsuits. And it, unfortunately, feels an awful lot like what the Pac-12 was going through two years ago when USA and UCLA left. And to me, that was really the beginning of the unraveling. And so I think if the ACC were to remain intact with the same number of schools they presently have, I think that probably shuts down some options. I think if there is some change in what their league membership looks like that’s significant, that also may represent opportunities. And I think our fans would say, ‘Kirk, don't tie us into something when you don't know what’s happening with one of the other major Power Four conferences.’ And we just think in the next six months, by the end of football season, whatever is going to happen (in the ACC) is going to happen. I think being flexible gives us the opportunity to look at what we might be doing on the West Coast.
Anne McCoy was promoted to be your athletic director this week. She goes from interim AD to permanent. What did you see that made you say she’s the pick?
When I called Anne originally to ask her to serve as interim, I expected she knew budget cuts were looming. We had a couple of coach openings. I expected to have to do a very hard sell about why I thought she was the right person. And she came back and said, ‘Hey, I love this place. I've been here for more than 20 years, and I believe I’m the right leader at the right time to take us forward.’ And so she almost went into sales mode with me on the phone.
It was maybe the biggest recruiting call I’ve ever done. It was 10 minutes long, and we had an agreement, and she was off to the races. I had people, John, on campus, who stopped me in elevators that I had never met. They would say, ‘Hey, look, you got the right person as athletic director. You need to pull interim off her name.’ I got that for three months, just different people within athletics. I started getting a lot more of that from donors in the last month who had a chance to sit down and meet with her. I heard that from the faculty and other people.
But I still think I wanted Anne to have the opportunity to show the Cougar Nation what she could do… she’s had an eventful three months, and I think managed it really well with a very level head… I had somebody on my staff who said, ‘Hey, Kirk, don't you dare put Anne in let her do all the tough work, and then go hire somebody from the outside that comes in after somebody’s made the really hard decisions.’ And I thought that was just a really good piece of advice.
About two weeks ago, I sat down with Anne and said, I think I would love for you to serve as our permanent AD. And so then we went through the process of just finishing up her paperwork and stuff like that. She is the right person at the right time for WSU moving forward. She has a lot of internal and external support, and I just think that's really important for us right now.
The Apple Cup will continue to be played in football. You guys have agreed to play Washington in a five-year extension of that rivalry series. How important is that series to Washington State?
It’s hugely important. I know after everything broke up, we had some segment of our fans that had no desire for us to ever play the University of Washington again. But I will tell you, John, from my experience when I was in the Big 12 and we watched Texas and Texas A&M go different directions, and Missouri, and Kansas, and these others... everybody was angry after a year But two or three years later, people are like, ‘Man, I miss those rivalries. That used to be such a big deal for us.’
So my experience of having gone through that and recognizing that, ‘Hey, realignment sucks, nobody likes it, but let’s not lose some of those long-term rivalries.’ I appreciate the fact that the University of Washington also came to it from that same perspective. That it was important in the state for the two large Division I football-playing schools to continue to play each other. So I think it’s going to be important to our fans. I think it’s fun in the state when those things happen.
You’ve covered sports in Oregon and Washington and other places for years. People get amped up that week, even if the game or teams aren't as competitive as everyone wants. Sometimes people get excited in the offices. Everybody takes a side during that week. I think for us, being able to play in a neutral site in Seattle with a huge population in Washington that lives in that area along that I-5 corridor, it’s a real opportunity for both programs, frankly, to showcase what they're going to be this next year. So is there some part of our fan base that was like, ‘Screw UW’? Absolutely. That part will still be there. At the end of the day, our fans and our athletes, and our coaches want to do this. I think it’s important for us to continue to meet annually and celebrate the rivalry and make sure that different conference affiliations don’t mean that those things go away.
I’m a deadline person. It’s the business I work in. You've got a one-year deadline right now until you retire. How does that feel? Are you at a point where you’re having to make some decisions about the things you really want to get done in the next year, or will that come with three months to go in the tenure?
I’ve got three or four things that were really critical for me. One was enrollment stabilization at WSU. I think that’s around the corner for us. We’re in the middle of a major fundraising campaign for WSU and we’ve got lots of positive momentum four years in. What I want to do is hand off to my successor that same fundraising momentum and excitement. The Pac-12 Conference and Cougar Athletics, I want to hand to the next person, ‘OK, here’s where we‘re going to be the next five years.’
I do not want a brand new president to come in and have to navigate that as much as possible. If I look at it, those are probably the things that I want to really focus on and spend my time on this next year. No, I do have three or four things, but it’s not 10… but if I can get those things across the finish line, and hand the baton off, I’ll feel really good about the transition.
The lede: “I (Schulz) had somebody on my staff who said, ‘Hey, Kirk, don't you dare put Anne in let her do all the tough work, and then go hire somebody from the outside that comes in after somebody’s made the really hard decisions.’ And I thought that was just a really good piece of advice.”
I worked for/with nine presidents and several others (Provosts, etc) who later became presidents. Only a few a) were secure enough to truly welcome critical input or advice b) admitted that others’ input informed their decisions c) appreciated the strategic importance of wading into and keeping an eye on athletics.
Schulz appears to be all three. And whatever animus exists (and no president worth their salt is without some) in Cougar Nation, be careful what you wish for. This guy appears to be someone I would have loved to work for.
So many interviews with conference presidents and athletic directors that are brain-numbingly mundane and vacuous and scripted. Until now. This guy really seems to get the relationship between the presidency of a university and the athletic department. He understands the extreme value of high-visibility college athletics. Man, WSU has a tough task replacing Kirk Schulz.