College Sports

Were you as surprised as I was that Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White is resigning to take the same position at Duke University?

I mean, isn’t Notre Dame supposed to be the pinnacle of college athletics? Heck, White held a position on the BCS committee as the only AD to sit with the six conference commissioners! And Duke? While the Blue Devils have great hoops teams, and some other solid sports, they aren’t exactly, well, Notre Dame.

White has been at Notre Dame since 2000, and I’m sure is being hired by Duke to attempt to clean up the mess that outgoing athletic director Joe Alleva is leaving behind (including multiple lawsuits related to the men’s lacrosse debacle). Alleva left Duke to take the AD job at LSU.

White is leaving a program that is ranked in most every sport and has it’s own television deal, with NBC, that brings in millions that it doesn’t have to share with anyone. And while Notre Dame bills itself as “The Nation’s University,” at Duke he will head an athletic department that fights for media coverage with numerous other schools, including North Carolina and North Carolina State.

Terms of the deal aren’t public yet, so there is no telling if there is some super compensation package on tap. According to White, it was just a situation of a job that “popped up at the right place and the right time and a strong overture by an infectious group of administrators and president of the university right at the top of that list.”

This will be the 57 year old White’s fifth run as head of an athletic department. In addition to Notre Dame, he has previous stops at Arizona State, Tulane, the University of Maine and Loras College.

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