Randy Peterson
|
June 16, 2025
They got it right, the folks who came up with a selection committee to assist finding a new Iowa State University president. The committee of 12 includes people (one in particular) with deep college sports backgrounds – paramount in this new age of college athletics.
That’s why they got it right, because whoever replaces Wendy Wintersteen must, I repeat, MUST have as much a grasp on what’s happening in sports-related boardrooms nationally, as in the areas of academia, fundraising and everything else a college president does.
That’s because the college sports world changed last week, when a judge approved a legal settlement that authorizes schools to pay its athletes directly from the department checkbook, starting on July 1.
It’s the revenue-sharing thing you’ve heard about, that allows each school to distribute up to $20.5 million to athletes.
It’s the most significant college sports decision since the inception of Title IX in 1972 -- a game-changer, that could include an entirely new generation of athletics savvy university presidents.
“The environment has changed since last the last presidential search in 2017,’” super Cyclones fan Jon Fleming, a retired Ames physician, told me this week. “Athletics is an integral part of the campus landscape. The search committee and the new president must have a grasp where we are now that respect.
“More than ever, this search has to bake athletics into the equation.”
Already, the Cyclones are fortunate to have an athletics director, that’d be Jamie Pollard, who knows as much about AD’ing than any AD in the nation. He’s been on every major committee imaginable. He’s got a dollars-and-cents mentality. He’s a visionary, and a successful fundraiser.
Since replacing Bruce Van De Velde in 2005, Pollard has been everything you’d want an Iowa State AD to be. Going forward, the university needs a president who already knows their way around whatever you choose to call today’s always-changing, billion-dollar college sports world.
I initially thought that position might go to Tim Day, but he’s on the search committee. For Iowa State, however, that can be the next-best thing.
Day has been the university’s Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA and the Big 12 Conference since 2010. He’s been a Veterinary Medicine professor since 2000, per the school’s web site.
He’s as connected throughout Iowa State’s campus as he is nationally, and that’s not always the case when academics meet athletics. He’s respected in all university circles, as was Wintersteen, recognized nationally “as a leader for innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education,” while also presiding over the university during an unprecedented decade of Cyclones athletics success.
Day knows what questions to ask during presidential interviews. He’s been living in this new college athletics world for a long time. He knows the rulebooks forward and backward, and equally important – from the beginning, he’s been involved with this historic college athletics transformation, both at the local and national level.
Tim Day would have been an excellent ISU presidential candidate.
At least he’s on the selection committee.
(Columnist Randy Peterson can be, and has been, reached at randypete4846@gmail.com or at any Okoboji-area beverage/food establishment between the hours of open and close.)