Neeli Bendapudi, named Thursday as Penn State’s 19th president, is no stranger to intercollegiate athletics challenges.
In her three years as president of the University of Louisville, she dealt with the suspension of the men’s basketball coach, the iffy retention of the football coach, the pending departure of the athletic director and the renaming of Papa John’s Stadium.
The challenges at Penn State will be different, as the university intercollegiate athletic program and football program are in much better shape.
Still, Bendapudi – who succeeds current president Eric Barron, hired in 2014 – will not be without major tasks (and opportunities), both immediate and down the road. Here is a list of some of the biggest items on her PSU ICA to-do list:
1. Evaluate the performance of and determine the future status of Sandy Barbour, Penn State’s VP for Intercollegiate Athletics.
Barbour, who was hired by Penn State in August 2014, had her contract extended in February 2019. It runs through Aug. 31, 2023.
Barbour’s initial base compensation was $800,000 (including retention bonus) when she was hired; in 2022, her base compensation will be $1.319 million, with an additional $240,000 a year in “a tax-favored benefit plan,” plus bonuses up to $260,000 a year. Counting the benefit plan, that’s an increase of $759,000, or 95%, in eight years.
After her extension, Barbour said that she hopes Penn State is her last stop as an athletic director, and later noted that does not specifically mean she plans to retire in 2023.
2. Review Penn State’s progress on meeting its federally-mandated Title IX obligations and take action to create more opportunities for women athletes on Penn State’s University Park campus, especially regarding representative participation.
Penn State touts Bendapudi as “a national leader in diversity and inclusion.” In intercollegiate athletics, that begins with gender equity in all manners.
As I researched extensively and wrote this summer (read it here), Penn State ranks at or near the bottom of the Big Ten Conference in meeting several important Title IX participation obligations for its women athletes. For example, based on each school’s 2019-20 report to the U.S. Dept. of Education:
— Discrepancy between male athletes and women athletes, counting male practice players: Penn State ranks 14th out of the 14 schools in the Big Ten, with the widest gap between male participants and female participants, at 114 — 540 male and 426 female (28 of whom are male practice players). Penn State also has the biggest gap when not counting male practice players.
— Discrepancy between the proportion of women undergraduate students and the proportion of women athletes, not counting male practice players — which I think is the fairest metric, because I do not believe the math that 1 male practice player = 1 female undergraduate student: Penn State ranks 14th in the Big Ten, with a 5.9% difference between female athletes (41.2%) and female students on the Penn State University Park campus (47.1%). Penn State also has the biggest gap when counting male practice players.
3. Revisit Barbour’s 20-year facilities master plan. Announced on March 13, 2017, the plan “creates a strategy to address year-around needs that will deliver a combination of new and renovated venues, enhancing the game day experience and integrating the facilities within the University Park campus in a more intentional manner.”
According to a press release the day of the announcement, “The Facilities Master Plan identifies five priority projects during the initial five years — falling in the next five-year capital plan — the first four of which are new construction:
- Center of Excellence
- Indoor practice facility
- 10-lane, 50-meter Natatorium
- 10-court Indoor Tennis Facility
- Renovation and upgrades to Jeffrey Field (men’s and women’s soccer facility)
The pandemic has certainly impacted the progress of that plan. However, Covid-19 did not slow Barbour and the Board of Trustees from recently making a 10-year, $85 million contractual commitment to head football coach James Franklin. (I count CJF’s deal as a base of $8.5 million per year: $7 million, base, annual cash out on a $1 million insurance policy and an annual $500,000 retention bonus. He can also make a lot more with additional bonuses.)
4. Get up to speed on Franklin’s contract and determine priorities — and decipher promises made — for football spending.
On Jan. 1, 2024 — just two football seasons hence (2022, 2023) — it will cost Franklin or a future employer only $2 million to buy out his contract with Penn State. At the same time, it will cost Penn State $56 million to buy out Franklin. Quite the deal for CJF.
Obviously, this is not an immediate priority for Bendapudi. If Penn State goes 22-5 over the next two seasons, as it did in 2016-17, it is very possible that Franklin will be seeking a new deal, as is his pattern (e.g., contract extensions in August 2017, February 2020, November 2021), or perhaps he will leave for a new job, as he’ll no doubt and justifiably be in high demand. However, if Penn State goes 11-10 or thereabouts over the next two seasons, as it did in 2020-21, that $56 million means PSU won’t be firing him any time soon.
Much more immediate for the new president is finding out what Franklin wants and/or demanded — and Barbour and the Board of Trustees promised to Franklin, if only verbally — regarding support of the program, especially financially. She’ll also have to get specific examples and accompanying costs regarding what Franklin said, via the press release when his contract extension was announced on Nov. 23, 2021:
“With the support of President Barron, Sandy Barbour and the Board of Trustees we’ve been able to create a roadmap of the resources needed to address academic support, community outreach, Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), facility improvements, student-athlete housing, technology upgrades, recruiting, training table and more. This renewed commitment to our student-athletes, community and fans reinforces all the reasons I’ve been proud to serve as your head football coach for the last eight years and why my commitment to Penn State remains steadfast. Throughout this process I’ve kept our leadership council, recruits and staff updated on those conversations and I’m excited we’ve reached an agreement we can finally share with you.”
This could mean items as varied as a bigger budget; a university commitment to build and/or renovate football-only dormitories; and a football-only indoor facility. See also No. 6.
5. Get to know, and listen to, key athletics donors and king-makers Terry Pegula, Ira Lubert and Galen Dreibelbis.
When it comes to football, ice hockey, arenas, wrestling, PSU sports history — and a new casino at the Nittany Mall — what these loyal and smart Penn State visionaries say, and spend, matters.
6. Commission a true, unbiased, independent (sorry, Populous) inspection of Beaver Stadium.
This would be similar to what a potential buyer does when contemplating purchasing a pre-owned house. This would be an audit and assessment, not an open work order or wish list. Beaver Stadium is now Bendapudi’s biggest physical plant asset on the University Park campus and a key element of the Penn State empire, which grosses $7.8 billion in annual revenues.
Maintenance and renovations of the stadium — after membership in the Big Ten, the largest cash register there is for Penn State athletics — need to be a higher priority than they have been the past several years. This is especially true given the advent of Penn State’s partnership with the new sports and entertainment commission that PSU has formed in partnership with the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau.
The 61-year-old stadium has not undergone any major projects since 2001.
7. Prioritize where to effectively put the next big influx of cash from the next big Big Ten Conference contract. (Did I say that it’ll be big?)
Over the previous two years, Penn State and its fellow conference members have each received $54-$55 million from the league office. The Big Ten is now in the catbird seat. The conference is looking at a new contract — contracts plural, actually — when its latest media deals end in 2023. Though FOX owns 51% of the Big Ten Network, the opportunity for new contracts with new/additional partners and across new platforms (hello, streaming) beyond BTN could push each school’s annual share of Big Ten money upwards to $100 million in the next three-four years.
Where will that money go – beyond the already-in-hand big salary increases for Franklin and Barbour — and will any be shared beyond athletics?
Right now, Penn State athletics gives a bit of that money (a few years ago, in the neighborhood of $4 million) back to Old Main, following a scenario that Ohio State also adheres to.
8. Keep NIL from becoming a Texas-sized headache.
That’s NIL, as in Name Image Likeness. Over the summer, Barbour and PSU ICA rolled out its STATEment program on educating and aiding its athletes to capitalize financially on their status.
To date, we have not heard of a boondoggle involving Penn State’s athletes like the one announced this week at the University of Texas: A group of Longhorns boosters announced Monday a fund that will give Texas offensive lineman under scholarship $50,000 a year to perform charity work for yet-to-be-disclosed charities.
This is what Franklin likes to call “unintended consequences.”
When it comes to Bendapudi, the prospects of NIL running amok and sullying the process are tangible, no matter which major college campus she would have landed at. Ultimately, while the dollars will be going to the athletes, the administrative and governance buck will ultimately stop at her desk, as conferences and college — including Penn State — figure out how make sense of it all.
9. Determine a stand on a strong constitution for the NCAA — and, in many ways, its ultimate purpose and fate.
Barbour is a member of the NCAA’s Constitution Committee, formed this summer, which is identifying the core principles that define college sports. The NCAA says the committee is working at warp speed “to propose a new governance model that allows for quicker change without sacrificing broader values, while either reaffirming or redefining those values.”
Barbour will definitely keep Bendapudi informed on the goings-on and will likely take some direction from her new boss as well. In the past, Penn State’s presidents have played a big role with the national governance and watchdogging of college athletics.
Two of Bendapudi’s predecessors were heavily involved in governing college athletics. Early in his tenure, Penn State president Graham Spanier was appointed to NCAA Division I Board of Directors. He chaired the board from 1997-2001 and was also an early leader of the Bowl Championship Series. In 2018, Barron was named to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, an independent body focused on promoting reforms that support and strengthen the educational mission of college sports.
