DALLAS--Bob Bowlsby is a man staring into two very different futures.
He likes what he sees when he examines the Big 12, where paychecks and stability are steadily rising.
Staring into the future of the NCAA produces a very different, uncomfortable picture.
"Change is coming," Bowlsby said, kicking off Big 12 Media Days at the Omni Hotel. "If you like what you see in intercollegiate athletics right now, you're going to be disappointed when the change comes."
Bowlsby spent most of his event-opening speech blasting NCAA enforcement and painting a bleak future for college sports before awkwardly segueing into talking points about the Big 12's bright days ahead.
It felt a little like showing off a particularly well-crafted snowman just after forecasting an avalanche.
"You won't find a snowman better positioned for the future than this one!"
In Bowlsby's two years at the Big 12 helm, he's never delved much into deep personal reflection, but as a man who has spent his entire career in college sports, the dark, depressing tone his speech took on Monday morning made it clear that college sports' future is a personal issue for him. He opened up more about his worries when I caught up with him late Monday.
"It would be greatly my preference to have people in college sports shaping college sports," Bowlsby said. "Having the courts involved and having plaintiffs, attorneys involved and the separation between student-athletes, coaches and the universities they represent is not something we all want to stand up and cheer."
Besides lawyers and judges deciding the future of college sports in a courtroom, Bowlsby didn't sound very comfortable with the growing practice of hiring athletic directors whose backgrounds are in any business enterprise besides college sports.
"There are some signs that it could change in ways that will be fundamentally uncomfortable for people who have been involved in education for a long period of time," he said.
He reiterated his stance that players shouldn't be employees.
Earlier in the day, he employed a bit of dark humor in joking that he planned to be in court for the rest of his career, but with uncertainty and appeals sure to follow initial rulings in the lawsuits brought on by Ed O'Bannon and former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston, among others, it's laced with a bit of truth.
At Big 12 spring meetings last month, Bob Bowlsby said he upped the budget for legal fees from $400,000 to $1.5 million for the upcoming school year, and set aside $7.8 million in conference money that could also be used for legal fees, among other miscellaneous expenses.
"What you see on Saturdays won't look a lot different, but it could be played by professional athletes, instead of by amateurs," he said, later citing a study that claimed a "significant majority" of college football fans will be less interested in the sport if that is the case.
We disagree on the validity of that study, but Bowlsby warned of the possibility that Olympic sports may be cut even with cost of attendance, and if pay-for-play becomes a reality, the chances of that happening become a budgetary reality. Cost of attendance could be implemented as soon as next fall, Bowlsby said, and those budgets will have to change somehow.
There's unanimous support in the Big 12 for cost of attendance, but also concern about the logistics of balancing a budget as colleges and athletes enter into a--as Bowlsby would say--new covenant with one another.
"There's only so much money out there," he said. "I don't think that coaches and athletic directors are likely going to take pay cuts. I think that train's left the station."
He predicted a future where 20 hour per week time limit on athletes is actually enforced, and time at home watching game tape counts toward that 20 hours, instead of subtracting from time spent studying. He also told me that college football moving from a 12-game schedule to an 11-game schedule was a possibility. Coaching staff personnel numbers would be limited.
"This is about helping 18-year-old adolescents become 22-year-old adults," he said. "If you get a chance to play professionally or in the Olympics, that's a highly desirable byproduct of the experience. But I got into this business because I consider myself an educator. There are some signs that that is going to change."
And yet, Bowlsby, who has continually denied he has any interest in being NCAA president Mark Emmert's possible successor, found himself stuck following up complaints and concerns about the business he loves with trumpeting the accomplishments and prospects of the conference that signs his paychecks.
It's all a little uncomfortable, but Monday, nobody seemed more uncomfortable resolving the two varying futures than the man who had been an athletic director in three different conferences before being put in charge of a fourth.
"You can't really extricate the Big 12 from the overall environment," he said. "I love the ADs and coaches and presidents and chancellors I work with. For that reason, there's cause for optimism, but overall, we're headed in the wrong direction. I hope that we will have a chance to minimize that."
