The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (39 page)

For the next few days, Moos scoured the sports page of the
Spokesman-Review
for any news on WSU’s plans. Then his phone rang. The call was from the president’s office at Washington State University.

“Bill, this is Elson Floyd.”

Floyd had an unmistakable deep voice that resembled that of singer Barry White. Moos recognized it immediately. Since leaving Oregon, he had consulted for Floyd on some athletic department issues and knew him on a first-name basis.

“Hello, Elson.”

“I want to cut to the chase,” Floyd said. “I want to know if you are interested in serving as the athletic director.”

“I am.”

Floyd had been caught off guard by his previous AD’s sudden departure. A national search committee had already been assembled. But Floyd had been privately polling key alumni, boosters and top administrators in athletics to get their input on whom to hire. The feedback was unanimous: Bill Moos. Floyd planned to let the national search run its course. But he already had his target in his sights.

“Bill, I have to go through a process,” he said. “It’s going to be a very public process. But you are my guy.”

They agreed to meet on campus within days.

Tall, with imposing broad shoulders and big muscular hands to go with his tightly cropped salt-and-pepper Afro, Elson Floyd could be easily mistaken for a retired pro football player. But engage him in conversation, and he comes across like a mix between a polished diplomat with old English manners and a CEO with a practical can-do approach. The fact is that he never played football and is less than a casual fan of the game. He’s an academic to the core. His top priorities were increasing enrollment and building on WSU’s reputation as a leading academic institution. He viewed football as a ticket to both.

“Like it or not, football serves as the front door to institutions, with the exception of the Ivy League,” Floyd explained. “The reputation of a school is predicated on athletics. Football is first. Basketball is second. If you have a successful football program, it will support all the other revenue and non-revenue sports.”

Floyd’s view of college football is consistent with more and more presidents and chancellors at leading colleges and universities in America today. But the reality is that very few football programs are profitable. At that point, only 20 of the top 120 Division I football programs were in the black. The remaining programs were losing on average close to $10 million per year. But it’s reached a point where virtually every college president has bought into the idea that in order for a university to be successful, it must have a successful football program.

Before taking over as president at WSU in 2007, Floyd spent four years as president at the University of Missouri, a school that competed against Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Kansas in the Big 12 Conference.
When Floyd got to Washington State, he immediately noticed that the Pac-10 was way behind the Big 12 and other conferences like the SEC and the Big Ten in terms of how much money is invested in athletics. It was a point he stressed when he and Moos met face-to-face to discuss the vacant AD position.

Seated in a high-back leather chair in the wood-paneled living room of the president’s home on WSU’s campus, Floyd made no bones about his desire to see the resurgence of the football program become a top priority.

“Football is an area where WSU has to make a much more strategic and important investment,” Floyd explained. “Our performance has not been what we would like. The only way to change that is to make investments in the physical facilities and the personnel.”

Moos could not have agreed more. To attract the best athletes, WSU needed great facilities and a great coach. That was the philosophy that Oregon had adopted before turning its fortunes around.

The other point Floyd stressed was that he had no plans to look over Moos’s shoulder. He had neither the time nor the interest in micromanaging the athletic department, particularly with respect to personnel decisions. Moos would be free to hire and fire coaches. Floyd’s only input was that he wanted to start attracting the best in the business to Pullman, even if that meant spending more money than in the past.

It all sounded perfect to Moos. There was just one hitch—the non-compete contract he had signed when he left Oregon. His generous severance package—$3.5 million—was spread out over ten years. Moos received annual $350,000 payouts. But they were contingent on his not taking a job with a BCS program west of the Mississippi. Accepting the WSU job was a definite breach. He’d have to forfeit the remaining seven years of severance money. That amounted to $2.45 million.

It was a potential deal killer. But Floyd didn’t want to dwell on it. He reiterated his hope that Moos would be the new AD. Then he sent him on his way for a full day of meetings and interviews on campus with other WSU officials and administrators.

Days later Bill Moos delivered some steers to Sandpoint, Idaho. He was headed back to Spokane, pulling an empty trailer behind his pickup truck, when Floyd called him. “Bill, you did an excellent job down here,” he said. “People were very impressed. I want to make you an offer to be the athletic director.”

Cell reception was spotty. But before dropping the call, Moos heard the annual base salary: $350,000.

Moos had already made up his mind that he was going to take the job, regardless of the money. He called Floyd back and told him he would accept.

“I wish something could have worked out with Oregon on your severance,” Floyd said.

“Well …”

“How many years did you have left?” Floyd asked.

“Seven. So I lose some security.”

“No,” Floyd said. “I am going to give you a seven-year contract.”

Under Floyd’s offer, Moos would end up making exactly what he would have received from Oregon. When he got back to the ranch, he told his wife it was time to dig his suits out of storage.

Bill Moos’s first official day on the job as AD at WSU was April 10, 2010. After hiring a ranch hand to help his wife run their ranch, Moos moved into a town house in Pullman and started working days, nights and weekends. There was a lot to do and little to work with. WSU had the smallest budget in the Pac-10, and the football team had become a serial loser. The Cougars had gone 2-11 in 2008 and 1-11 in 2009. Attendance was down. Fan apathy was up. Giving had come to a standstill. Meanwhile, the stadium was in dire need of improvements and expansion.

Moos made a list of top priorities:

Then he made a list of obstacles:

The question was, where to begin? Then he got an unexpected call.

“Moos?”

“Yes.”

“Philip Knight.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“I’m good. I just want to congratulate you.”

“Thanks.”

“College athletics needs you. The Pac-10 needs you. I think it’s super that you are back in it.”

“I really appreciate that, Phil.”

The conversation went on for fifteen minutes. Moos told Knight that one of his first orders of business was to work with Nike to rebrand WSU. The Cougars desperately needed an identity. Knight understood. He had a favorite saying he had shared with Moos many times back at Oregon: “You don’t need a sign on the Eiffel Tower. When you
see
the Eiffel Tower, you
know
that it is the Eiffel Tower. Now when you see the
O
, you know it is Oregon.”

By the time the two men hung up, Moos knew the hatchet had been buried. Knight had pledged to send his best design team at Nike up to Pullman.

One thing Moos had going for him was experience. The minute he took over as AD at WSU, he became the senior AD in the Pac-10 Conference. This immediately thrust him into a leadership role right as the conference was undergoing seismic changes. For starters, the Pac-10 was about to become the Pac-12.

By 2010, conference realignment was sweeping college football, and the Pac-10 was no exception. It had invited Utah and Colorado to join. The decision to expand was a financial one that made fiscal sense for everybody, but especially for schools with smaller athletic budgets like WSU. Under NCAA rules, only conferences with twelve schools can hold a conference championship game. There were obvious benefits for the two teams that play in a championship game. But even the conference’s other schools stood to receive roughly $500,000 each from the game.

But expansion also created some challenges, like figuring out how to split the conference into two divisions. There was a lot to consider, such as geography, long-standing traditional rivalries and competition of schedules. All of that had to be sorted out fast. The Pac-10 television contracts with ESPN and Fox were about to expire in 2011. Commissioner Larry Scott was gearing up to negotiate new deals with both networks. But he also
planned to launch a Pac-12 network. “We had a lot of inventory that wasn’t making its way to TV,” said the conference’s chief operating officer, Kevin Weiberg. “Under the old deal with ESPN and Fox many of our basketball games and football games were not on TV.”

The same month that Moos took the helm at WSU, Weiberg joined the Pac-10 to help oversee the launch of the conference network and serve as Scott’s top deputy as he prepared for negotiations with ESPN and Fox. Previously, Weiberg had been VP of planning and development for the Big Ten Network. With the addition of Utah and Colorado, the Pac-12 would feature a conference network that included six regional networks. Pac-12 Washington, for example, would feature Washington and Washington State games, while Pac-12 Arizona would feature Arizona and Arizona State games, and so forth. That way, the Pac-12 Network in the appropriate regional markets would televise every football game that wasn’t picked up by ESPN or Fox.

To fill additional programming space, the conference planned to tap its rich history with Olympic sports. In the 2008 Summer Olympics alone, the Pac-10 had 256 athletes compete, and they brought home eighty-nine medals. Yet for years, world-famous Olympic athletes from the Pac-10 such as Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Matt Biondi had gone virtually unnoticed until they left college. Scott wanted to change that.