Fort Worth Magazine
Mike Buddie, left, TCU President Daniel Pullin, and the most super of Frogs.
Suffice to say, Mother Nature played her part to welcome new TCU Athletic Director Mike Buddie and his family from the northern climes to Fort Worth.
“I appreciate this warm welcome,” Buddie said Monday midmorning at a press conference in the Legends Club, atop the east side of Amon G. Carter Stadium, the central air and heating apparatus getting in a full workout. “I guess warm may not be the right word for it. You can imagine our comfort level when we woke up this morning to 23 degrees. I don't know who pulled that string just to make us feel right at home. It is not our doing. Please don't blame that on us. You can blame us for a lot of other things in the near future, but not the weather.
“We are thrilled to be here.”
And with that formal introduction, the Mike Buddie era of TCU athletics had begun. Buddie is the ninth athletic director in university history, succeeding Jeremiah Donati, who left for the same job at University of South Carolina.
He comes from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where island hopping has nothing to do with spring break and whose value system is duty, honor, country.
And no NIL.
Like all those valiant men and women who leave West Point for the hottest spots, Buddie has willingly jumped into tornado alley of the dysfunction of the big-time business of college athletics and the changed landscape of NIL, revenue sharing, and transfer portals.
That kind of whirlwind of turmoil would seem to be akin to putting a ring on a rebound from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” or wherever. The migraine of all migraines.
“Institutions that just want to recruit young men and women who want the biggest price tag are going to have challenges,” Buddie said. “What I love about TCU is the value proposition extends so much farther beyond a price tag. We want to recruit and find young people who still want to have an education, who are willing to be held accountable, want to have a degree that's going to change their lives for the next 60 years, not just take that highest dollar amount paycheck.
“We're going to compete at the highest levels of revenue sharing, but we still want to find kids who care, kids who want to be good teammates, active members of our community, and great character kids.”
So, duty, honor, culture. But, in addition to that start, practically speaking, Buddie said, “We’ve got to find a better solution.” What all that looks like is a work in progress.
TCU has found the guy it believes will keep them not only at the “big boy table” in college athletics but highly competitive.
During his tenure at Army, Buddie is credited with leading the athletics program to unprecedented achievements, including the football team’s earning a College Football Playoff ranking in 2024. The Black Knights won a program record 12 games, a mark that ties for the most in a season by any service academy in history.
“We have built an incredible athletics foundation at Texas Christian University,” said TCU President Daniel Pullin. “And what we now need is a leader who builds upon that excellence. Through this search, it became clear that the leader we needed, needed to be rooted in the birthplace of some of our greatest leaders in American history. We found that leader at the United States Military Academy at West Point. That leader is Mike Buddie.”
Pullin was joined on the dais by Chancellor Victor J. Boschini, who will soon retire. Sitting on the front row was Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormak.
Buddie’s path to athletic administration was much like those of many others in no particular career: “Dumb luck.”
After retiring from a baseball career in 2002 that included 87 games as a pitcher with the New York Yankees and Milwaukee Brewers, Buddie found himself confronting an “oh, crap” moment. He was 34, married with two children, a mortgage, a ragged right arm no one wanted anymore, and no foundation for new career.
He re-enrolled at Wake Forest to finish his degree.
“It was the same time ‘Old School’ came out with Will Ferrell,” he joked of the movie about 30-somethings who go back to school and frat life.
He thought his career would take him to coaching baseball, professionally or collegiately, but after school, he started work in the development office at Wake Forest to fundraise.
“I was qualified to do nothing else,” he said, “so they put me in the development office, which is really, I think, the most helpful base that an athletic director can have.”
He eventually asked Ron Wellman, then-AD at Wake Forest, for an opportunity to work in the athletic department to get his feet wet in the matters of administration in college athletics. “I went to the AD and I said, I got into college athletics to be around young people,” Buddie said. That wasn't the case as a fundraiser. Wellman created a pathway for him to gain the experience he wanted.
“So, I really fell into it by dumb luck,” Buddie said.
“It became very obvious [Buddie was the right hire] when you just think about what he has built consecutively in his career, not only starting back in Major League Baseball and the rise to that and kind of working forward,” said Rusty Reid, chairman of Higginbotham, member of the TCU Board of Trustees and chair of the board’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee. “We were just really [blown away] over and over in his communications, his track record, his attention to the detail, really diving into the strategic plan, knowing that that's a pillar of what we use to provide success to this institution.”
Athletics is among the core pillars of the TCU’s strategic plan — Lead On: Values in Action.
Leading nationally in college athletics is expected soon to equate to a budget and budget cap, according to reports, of $20.5 million to pay athletes through a combination of sharing some athletic department revenue, complemented by resources from a school’s NIL collective. The cap represents 22% of Power 4 (Big 12, ACC, Big Ten, SEC) revenues from the previous academic year. Moreover, the cap has built in escalators of 4% in years two and three, before being recalculated in year four.
Schools can distribute the revenue any way they see fit, though players from football and men’s basketball, the biggest revenue generators, are expected to see most of it.
Buddie was insulated from almost all of that at Army. There is no NIL at the service academies, and there is no transfer portal recruiting. Furthermore, few leave the academies through the portal, though Army did recently lose a high-profile running back, Kanye Udoh, to Arizona State.
“The good news is I'm not the only one thinking about it,” Buddie said. “There are a lot of smart people who run athletic departments, conference offices, and institutions. We've got to find a better solution.”
Like, for example, multiyear contracts back loaded with signing bonuses and retention bonuses. If you’re still on the team, say, as a junior, you receive a bonus.
“There’s no magic wand solution, but I think multiyear contracts are going to be potentially a great opportunity. Then you’ve just got to have a culture where people want to be a part of it.”
Duty. Honor. Culture.
