Jeremiah Donati’s successor as TCU’s athletic director will have a BIG aspiration
TCU director of athletics Jeremiah Donati’s exit to the University of South Carolina caught his bosses by surprise, but this move was inevitable.
Donati talked extensively with the University of Southern California in 2023 to become its AD, but late in the process he changed his mind, due primarily over family concerns.
One year later, and seeing the chasm widening between The BigSEC10 and the rest of the world, Donati is following a similar path as one of his predecessors. In 2005, TCU athletic director Eric Hyman also went to South Carolina for the same job.
Donati is not expected to attend TCU’s women’s basketball game on Sunday against South Carolina at Dickies Arena.
Finding a new AD becomes the immediate priority for new TCU chancellor Daniel Pullin.
“It’s the season for it, right?” Pullin said. “Coaches change, the transfer portal, so this is just part of it.”
TCU has hired a search firm to pool potential candidates, and Pullin put a four to six week timeline on this process. Both he and outgoing chancellor Victor Boschini will collaborate on this search.
Unlike when Chris Del Conte left the TCU AD role for the same job at University of Texas, in December of 2017, TCU has no obvious internal candidate to fill this role. Del Conte hired Donati to join TCU’s staff as an assistant, in 2011, to groom him to become an AD.
Pullin, who came to TCU in 2019 to lead TCU’s business school, has deep ties to his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, and a long relationship with its athletic director, Joe Castiglione. Expect a candidate or two to have Sooner ties. Expect most of the candidates to have served as an AD.
Since Frank Windegger retired as TCU’s AD in 1998, three of the school’s next four people in that position had been ADs at previous schools: Hyman had been the AD at Miami of Ohio; Danny Morrison had been the AD at Wofford; Del Conte had been the AD at Rice. Only Donati had not previously served as an AD.
The TCU AD job is not the one Donati grew to thrive in after he replaced Del Conte. The creation of NIL, paying players, increased conference consolidation, and the transfer portal has added layers of responsibility to the job.
“The world of college athletics has changed so much in the last three years, and the skill set necessary to do that job is constantly evolving,” Pullin said. “I’m sure we’ll be looking for someone who fits at TCU and brings energy, enthusiasm, and a love for student athletes, among other attributes.”
An AD of a power conference school is now a glorified CEO/CFO whose primary function is to find money to pay for the escalating costs of funding an athletic department. The next TCU AD will be tasked with those responsibilities, as well as the silent hope of scoring an invite to the Big 10.
TCU’s next AD’s task is clear
Sitting at a table over looking TCU’s “quad” on Tuesday evening, Boschini and Pullin discussed the school’s future in athletics. Few schools in the nation used the athletics model to grow, and enhance, its campus, brand and image more effectively than TCU.
Neither sound concerned that the model will be any less effective than it was when the school leaned into the plan, in 1998.
“I don’t think the power of sports will get bigger, I think it will get exponentially bigger,” Boschini said. “They don’t call it, ‘News, Weather and Pottery.’ Ask any kid under 30, if there was a common culture in America, it would be either sports or music. Every kid knows sports, every kid knows music, whether they are into it or not.”
The concern, especially for TCU people over the age of 40, is whether the school can remain relevant, and competitive, on a shrinking national stage. There remains a large sector of the TCU community that fears “being left out.”
There is that sector of the TCU community that always expects not the other shoe but a shoe store to drop on their hopes, aspirations, and their university. Much of this fear is based on TCU’s exclusion from the Big 12, in 1996.
The current fear is of a mythical “super league” in college sports that will consist only of the select few that are selected by The BigSEC10, and approved by ESPN. This is why schools such as Miami, TCU, Clemson, Florida State and a few others are hoping, should either the Big 10 or SEC expand again, they get an invite.
Pullin has been on TCU’s campus since 2019, but he is well aware of those fears, even if he didn’t live through the trauma.
“On some level I am thankful for that because that’s a motivator for people like us. It keeps us sharp, aggressive and entrepreneurial,” Pullin said. “We understand that emotion, and how that must have felt at that time. We worked so hard to get back to the big table.
“Recognizing that sentiment, and having long memories, is motivating to do whatever we can strategically to build the right infrastructure to attract the right talent ... so we look every bit the part of a tier one academic university, a tier one research university, and a tier one athletics university. If you have those three, you have it all.”
His mission now is to find the right candidate to sell it.
This story was originally published December 5, 2024 at 2:26 PM.
