Hi: Thanks for the input and indeed I may be an ignorant fan! But I would caution about believing that the AD has a small role in realignment -- at least not in the P5. Susan Herbst may make some kind of statement in public -- but she and her presidential colleagues use ADs in the highly confidential pre-vote phase. Then the lawyers take over.
Here is part of an article that appeared in Forbes last year about the changing role of ADs. What is key from the article is that every school is in a unique position. That is why universities need to be very careful about who they hire.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbe...-day-college-athletics-director/#6a3a61b82002
Written by Daniel Parker, Vice President & Managing Director, Sports at Parker Executive Search and Jason Belzer, Founder of GAME, Inc. and a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Sports Law at Rutgers University.
- Advising their university administration and constituents on how to best navigate through conference realignment. That means being proactive instead of reactive when it comes to best positioning their departments to make a move into a different conference, as well as ascertaining the changing landscape of their current conference and peer institutions that can potentially hurt their own future opportunities. Conference realignment often has a clear set of winners and losers, and athletic directors that are ill prepared to lead their universities through such tumultuous processes can often also be its first casualty.