Tom McMillen, the former University of Maryland basketball star and congressman, will step down at the end of the summer from his role as CEO of LEAD1 Association, the FBS athletic director trade association announced Thursday.
McMillen, 71, has led LEAD1 for nine years, during which time the enterprise of college sports has been shaken to its core on account of legal and legislative deathblows to the NCAA’s model.
That commotion has complicated the work of LEAD1, which, prior to McMillen taking over in late 2015, had re-charted its mission. The organization’s board chair at the time, now-former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, had sought to turn what had largely been an association focused on professional development, to one seeking to build athletic directors’ collective influence by finding consensus.
“The role we have played is to be a convener to talk about these issues,” McMillen said in a telephone interview Thursday.
However, due to the inhibiting effects of NCAA litigation and the growing forces of financial opportunism, solidarity has been harder to come by in recent times—even among the establishment.
“It has become a lot more siloed,” McMillen said. “It is not as inviting an atmosphere as when I started. … Athletic directors rarely come together, and I don’t think that is good for the industry.”
McMillen similarly blamed Congressional inaction on the “fractious nature of the industry.”
Though not a registered lobbyist, McMillen has been a frequent fixture in the halls of Congress, having relocated LEAD1 to the Washington, D.C., area upon assuming the CEO job. Unofficially, McMillen has also served as one of the go-to voices for the powers that be in intercollegiate athletics, a role he took on more and more during the reign of the NCAA’s much-maligned and media-averse past president, Mark Emmert.
For his part, McMillen says he has enjoyed a much closer relationship and frequent dialogue with the current NCAA president, Charlie Baker, a fellow former politician who also happened to be born in the same hospital in New York.
McMillen’s announced departure comes amid a mass exodus in the C-suites of college sports, including retirements among some of McMillen’s key AD acolytes: Duke’s Kevin M. White in 2021; Penn State’s Sandy Barbour in 2022; Iowa’s Gary Barta in 2023; Swarbrick this past March; and Ohio State’s Gene Smith this coming July.
McMillen, however, insists he is not retiring, instead describing his LEAD1 leave-taking as an act of “switching mountains.” He says he plans to remain engaged in the debate over college sports’ future, even if it’s not necessarily his full-time occupation.
McMillen readily acknowledges his “disappointments” with many of the developments over the last decade, particularly the fallout of the antitrust cases filed by classes of current and college athletes against the NCAA. As these lawsuits have turned the enterprise on its head, so too have they bedeviled LEAD1.
“In the beginning, it wasn’t so legalistically focused,” McMillen said. “We were focused on academic misconduct, a lot of internal NCAA issues, regional scheduling—a lot of things dealing with the enterprise. Now, we spend so much of our time watching and observing and monitoring these legal issues.”
McMillen says he has also been dismayed by the lack of college sports solutions from Congress, despite numerous bills being proposed and hearings held.
“If you go back to the earliest NIL bills, they were simple, in retrospect,” McMillen said. “And all of a sudden, the issues morphed, and they got more complicated. It has been a moving target.”
Asked for his assessment about future Congressional intervention, McMillen conceded he doesn’t “have a clue where it is going to go,” at least not until or unless a settlement is reached in the House v. NCAA lawsuit and “dust clears the air.”
After a decade-long NBA career, which concluded with the Washington Bullets, McMillen served in the House of Representatives during the late 1980s and early ‘90s. There he garnered a reputation as a college sports critic seeking to upset the status quo. In 1990, McMillen was behind a legislative effort opposed by the NCAA that required universities to disclose their athlete graduation rate.
In 1991, McMillen sponsored the Collegiate Athletics Reform Act, which proposed giving the NCAA a temporary antitrust exemption conditioned on a number of reforms. Those included guaranteed five-year scholarships for athletes, greater due process in NCAA infractions cases, and a distribution of television revenue designed to counterbalance football and basketball, while incentivizing Title IX compliance and athlete academic performance.
The legislation, which McMillen then acknowledged “may be a little bit ahead of its time,” ultimately didn’t go anywhere. The following year, McMillen continued to press his prescriptions for reform in a book he co-authored, Out of Bounds: How the American Sport Establishment is Being Driven by Greed and Hypocrisy—and What Needs to be Done about it.
Among other things, the book criticized the NCAA for its championing of “shamatuerism.”
Given this history, McMillen’s decision to join LEAD1, then called the 1A Athletic Directors’ Association, struck some other college sports reformers—particularly those pushing for athlete economic opportunities—as selling out the cause for a high-paying job. McMillen earned $500,000 in 2022, according to LEAD1’s tax filings. (The group is primarily funded through membership, which accounted for $1.2 million of its $1.7 million in 2022 revenue.)
McMillen, however, insists his perspective on college sports has remained consistent over the years.
“Listen, I am all for kids making money—I was a pioneer in calling for it—but we have allowed for some of the excess to get out of control,” McMillen said.
In June 2022, McMillen wrote an op-ed for Sportico arguing that athletic departments—and, thus, athletic directors—should be in charge of overseeing athlete NIL activities. By dint of new state-based laws and a lawsuit filed against the NCAA by several state attorneys general, that idea is fast coming into being.
However, McMillen’s priorities are ultimately less concerned about spreading the wealth to athletes and more about redistributing it among schools and sports.
“If I were playing God, I would take this vast sum of money on the table and find ways to redirect it to HBCUs,” McMillen said. “I would amplify the idea that this (college sports) is one of the greatest professional development machines, and I would have gone much further.”
He added: “The big vision of college sports is that we don’t have a half-a-million but a million college athletes. We create more opportunities, do more for underprivileged schools. That is kind of where I would like the system to go, and I don’t think it is out of the question.”
If McMillen so chooses, he will have at least two more opportunities to make this case before a large group of FBS athletic directors: at LEAD1’s June breakout meeting in Las Vegas, as part of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics convention; and at the LEAD1 fall member meeting in Washington.
His official last day will be Sept. 30.
