Thoughts On The AD Search, Purcell

As expected, Bobby Purcell—Executive Director of The Wolfpack Club—has officially thrown his name into the ring as a candidate for the N.C. State AD job. Purcell interviewed for the same position 10 years ago when Lee Fowler was hired.

I’m conflicted on where I stand with hiring Purcell away from the WPC.

On the one hand, Purcell possesses just about every quality you would want in an AD at State. First and foremost, he’s a HUGE State fan. Don’t let the UNC business degree fool you--he grew up a State, was one throughout college, and per his roommate at Chapel Hill, even had State posters up in his dorm room. It takes stones to hang a State poster in a dorm room in Chapel Hill, especially in the mid-to-late 70’s when State-Carolina was THE rivalry in the state. He spent time as an assistant football coach and recruiting coordinator with the Wolfpack during the early 80’s and landed Erik Kramer, one of the best quarterbacks in State’s history.

Secondly, he’s a professional. He manages a large scale budget with a great number of employees and many more volunteers across the state. He knows the value of operating a tight ship and keeping order throughout a large organization. He understands the value of consistent growth within an organization, as evidenced by the steady growth of the WPC membership to over 20,000 members.

Thirdly—and perhaps most key—he’s an effective closer on the fundraising circuit. In 2007, Purcell was named University Division Fundraiser of the Year by the National Association of Athletic Development Directors (NAADD). A read of the fantastic Wall Street Journal piece about his work with the WPC shows that he knows how (and feels quite comfortable) to say the right things to open the wallets of multimillionaires and billionaires to give large amounts year in and year out. An AD has to be able to sell the program to prospective hires, the media and the academic administration, and Bobby’s shown he can do all that.

And if Purcell is passed over a second time as a candidate for AD, could State still lose Purcell from the WPC? Would he become disillusioned with State’s leadership and take an AD position elsewhere out of disappointment? That doesn’t seem like something he would do based on his track record and testaments to his character, but speaking personally, if I were passed over twice for my dream job, I might find it hard to come back to work in the same position and wait another decade for that same opportunity to come around a third time. In a way, not promoting him from the WPC could be worse for WPC than promoting him away from his position.

But on the other hand, there are things about promoting Purcell to AD that concern me.

(Continues)

Primarily, I’d hate to lose his leadership within the WPC. State’s membership growth is due in large part to Purcell, and I fear losing him from that head position would jeopardize the tremendous things the WPC is poised to accomplish in the future. He’s quite possibly too valuable to move out of that seat.

Secondarily, his close association with so many of the movers and shakers within the existing power structure of Wolfpack Athletics may make it difficult and perhaps impossible for Purcell to completely restructure the organization in the way it needs to be. Selling naming rights to beautiful buildings likely (presumption on my part) means making promises of access and influence that will be tough to break when they need to be, and if what I’ve heard about some of our largest donors is true, they will be very, very unwilling to relinquish this kind of influence in future hiring/firing decisions. Just as knowing the right folks within the alumni base can be a blessing from a fundraising standpoint, it can also be a curse from a decision making one.

I’ve reconciled things to this: If—after an exhaustive AD search from a third-party firm—Bobby Purcell is determined to be the best possible candidate for the job, I will have ZERO problem with that whatsoever. In my mind, he’s certainly qualified. But I would be very, very disappointed if the university, Chancellor Woodson and the Board Of Trustees simply settles on Purcell because he represents the path of least resistance.

An associate AD from an Ohio State, Texas or Florida would bring new blood and no prior existing alliances to current donors, which may be exactly what the program needs to snap itself out of this funk it’s been in for the last 25 or so years. Fowler, however, was “new blood,” and we saw how well he shook up things...if anything, the status quo got WORSE under his watch than better. Bottom line, there are no guarantees.

For the overall good of the university, may the best man or woman win the position.

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Latest From TBJ: Interim Chancellor Jim Woodward Informed Fowler Of His Fate In March

Pretty brass move for an interim chancellor, if you ask me. I knew I liked that guy!

Lee Fowler has known since March that his run as athletics director at North Carolina State University would end June 30, Chancellor Randy Woodson said Tuesday afternoon.

In a telephone interview a few hours after the university announced Fowler’s resignation, Woodson said that former interim chancellor Jim Woodward informed Fowler in March that the university would part ways with the athletics director by June 30.

Woodson added that the timing of the announcement was left up to him.

Wow. How you like them apples?

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It's Official: Lee and State Agree To Part Ways

N&O's Joe Giglio Reports

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Required Reading: John Feinstein Recalls V 17 Years After His Passing

I missed this when it came out on April 28th. I wish I'd seen it then. It's from John Feinstein's blog, "Feinstein On The Brink," and it's a fantastic look at Jimmy V from the perspective of someone that new him well. It reads much like his excerpt about Valvano from "A March To Madness," which honestly was the best part of that book to me.

I certainly can't (and won't out of respect to Feinstein) repost the entire article here--it is worth reading at his site in its entirety. Here, though, is a great snippet:

Jim and I had been close for a long time. I had seen him play at Rutgers (he was part of a superb backcourt along with a great shooter named Bob Lloyd) and had first gotten to know him when he coached at Iona. I had spent many late nights sitting with him after games when he was coaching at State. Like most coaches, Jim couldn’t sleep after games—he was never much of a sleeper to begin with—and he would always head up to his office after doing his postgame press conference in Reynolds Coliseum and order pizza, wine and beer. His coaches would come in and hang out and so would various friends. I always stayed until the end because I knew when the room cleared out, Jim would stop telling stories and get serious. As hysterically funny as his stories were—I still re-tell some of them when I speak—the best parts of the evening always came well after midnight.

Jim would put down his wine glass and often stretch out on the couch in his office and say things like, “I need to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”

He was constantly restless. He had spent his life dreaming about winning a national championship and then when he won one at the age of 37, in the most dramatic fashion possible, he felt unfulfilled. You could almost hear the famous line from the old Peggy Lee song, ‘Is that all there is?” playing in his head on a constant loop.

He chased The Next Thing for a while, flying to New York on Monday mornings to appear on CBS’s ‘Early Morning,’ Show; doing color on occasional games IN season; hosting that awful sports bloopers show; doing a pilot for a variety show in Hollywood (seriously); selling memorabilia; becoming the athletic director at State. Anything to avoid being JUST a coach.

Everyone knows what happened: he stopped paying enough attention to his program and enough bad kids seeped bad kids seeped in to bring the program down. A book, written with the (paid) cooperation of a former manager, helped bring about an NCAA investigation—even though there were so many in-accuracies in it on simple things like what day of the week Thanksgiving fell on (I’m not joking) that it should not have been taken seriously. Still, the investigation led to probation and to Valvano being forced to resign after the 1990 season. Twenty years later I think it is fair to say that State still hasn’t recovered from that episode.

John is dead on here, sadly.

Even sadder is that years later, perception has become reality moreso than fact, as evidenced by some of the comments by those following the piece. They refer to Jim as a cheat, dirty, among other things. It's amazing to this day what a piece of fiction did to that man and our school, perception-wise. It was like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or meltdown in the town of Chernobyl. The events have long since passed but the effects are still felt to this day.

It helps having folks with strong voices like Feinstein trying to set the record straight. But since these pieces only come out rarely, they do little good all these many years later.

Nevertheless, a must read from Feinstein.

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WRAL Video of CJ Leslie's Press Conference

Video of CJ Leslie's official announcement from Word Of God Academy today that he's attending N.C. State this fall. Sounds like he did not have the same phone conversation with John Calipari that Terrence Jones did, which is good for us.

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