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ASU’s new athletic director talks about evolving with the changing landscape of college sports

Man in blue suit smiles
Bruce Racine/Arizona State University
Graham Rossini

Graham Rossini has taken over as Athletic Director at ASU at an interesting time.

In May, he replaced Ray Anderson, who was fired after a recruiting scandal in the football program and underperformance by a number of teams on the field. It also comes as ASU is in its first season in the Big 12 Conference; the school — like all others — is also navigating the relatively new worlds of Name, Image and Likeness and the increasing conversations about paying student-athletes.

Rossini is an ASU alum, although this is his first Athletic Director job. He joined The Show to discuss what appeals to him about this job, since it’s his first as athletic director.

Full conversation

GRAHAM ROSSINI: First AD gig, but I'm a longtime Sun Devil. And so it, it allows me to combine my education, my area of interest, my career progression in a place that I love and have benefited from. So really a dream come true in many, many, many ways.

MARK BRODIE: A lot of your experience before this job was sort of on the business side of sports, what has that taught you that has helped you so far.

ROSSINI: Yeah, I've been lucky to be tied to a team in one way shape or another since I was 4 years old. And so team sports is really kind of the environment that I've grown up around. And, you know, the athletics has been part of my background, sports business was maybe my professional training. And I think drawing from the collection of that experience has really been helpful in the preparation for the role.

BRODIE: It seems as though this is an interesting time for the business of college athletics, a lot of stuff going on. What have you found that maybe you didn't expect about that coming in and maybe what has been sort of as you expected?

ROSSINI: I think it's actually been helpful to anticipate where college sports is headed and, you know, my sports business background and, and building a team around the athletic department and the university that helps us evolve with this changing landscape that we're navigating and we're not proponents that student athletes should become employees.

We are aware that we need to sophisticate the way that we run the business of an athletic department. And that's all intended to create resources that we can reinvest in the young people. So I think a lot of it's just been using sports business, using, you know, attributes of professional sports, which I spent a lot of time in and bringing that in, in ways that we can drive ticket sales, corporate partnerships, different donor and VIP experiences all with the mindset of creating that we can reinvest into the young people that we're here to serve and, and lead.

BRODIE: So where do you think college sports is headed? Especially as it relates to the relationship, I guess between the student athletes and their universities?

ROSSINI: Yeah, it's an evolving landscape as we've mentioned and where this lands, I don't think anybody's got that crystal ball quite yet figured out. But we do understand that there is a tremendous sense of urgency in solidifying the landscape.

There's class action lawsuits happening around the NCAA landscape right now. We're, we're very close to that. The Big 12 of our conference is very close to those conversations.

And so we're getting almost daily insights into the changes that could be coming, but the changes will in essence, create structure and guard rails and much more clarity in the environment that we're here to operate.

And this is a time that we're navigating conference realignment, we're navigating the transfer portal where our athletes have the opportunity to, to move on from an institution or join ASU at the same time. And then the era of name, image and likeness where a student athlete can utilize his or her social media profile or, or presence in a market to, you know, earn some, some resources and revenue in return. So, not sure when, when it stabilizes, we're hopeful that it happens soon, but we're really tracking on a number of scenarios and solutions that fit for us at ASU.

BRODIE: Let me ask you about the NIL situation because I know that's been a focus both for you and for the university. What are some of the ways that you're looking to try to help the current student athletes take advantage of that? And maybe how much are you trying to use that as a recruiting tool to get students to come here?

ROSSINI: Yeah, I think there's a tremendous recruiting tool for us specifically here at ASU around how do we incorporate NIL into our message? And oftentimes, you know, we have almost 700 athletes across our 26 sports. We've got athletes from over 40 countries in the world and many of them have specialized in their sports since they were a young age.

And so you're looking at young people that are gonna graduate very well educated, they've got a rich set of intangibles and innate skills as an athlete, but they haven't had the ability to work a part-time job in high school. They haven't had time to do an internship while they were studying. But NIL enters the conversation as a way for them to promote a product or service that they're aligned with that they see value in and then start to gain a professional network and some really, really valuable resume experience that helps prepare them for life after sport.

BRODIE: How important is having a strong NIL program to recruiting student athletes to come here.

ROSSINI: It's critical, you know, there were, there were moments in, in college sports where you were only recruiting on the quality of your coaching staff, then you were laying on the academic institution. There was an era where uniforms and facilities were really what captured the imagination of recruits.

Now, we need all those things and also relevancy and name image and likeness. And I think we're, we're very fortunate in having the full strength of ASU behind what we're doing here in athletics, support from President Crow and, and university leadership. But you pair that with the fact that we're in the Valley, this incredible metropolitan area, people are moving here by the millions over the last decade. We have a number of companies that are setting up shop and it just creates an endless aisle of opportunities that we're eager to pursue.

BRODIE: I wanna ask you about a plan that the University of Tennessee is putting into place where they're basically adding a 10% surcharge to all of their ticket prices to pay for revenue sharing of a plan that's going into effect next year. I'm curious if you see anything like that at ASU and if not, maybe what, how you envision making that work?

ROSSINI: Yeah, we're hyper focused on generating more revenue any way that we can. And we really believe that there's an opportunity to focus on the game day and the community support that surrounds ASU and, and there's no secret that a full Mountain America Stadium on a football game day, a full Desert Financial Arena on a basketball game day, economically, those are the most important outcomes for us to focus on. They're also the most important outcomes that our fans are asking us to make that investment in a football and make that investment into men's and women's basketball. So we really believe that a lot of great energy and attention into our football and basketball game days economically creates the resources that we need to compete in all 26 of our sports.

BRODIE: Does that maybe give you pause then in terms of making ticket prices more expensive or putting additional surcharges on, for example?

ROSSINI: Yeah, I don't, I don't know that the price point is the end all be all. I think we look at the volume that we can accomplish over the course of the year and, and that's where we have the benefit of when you have multiple sports. We have seven that we believe should be selling out the stadiums or the arenas. And that's because we have competitive sports. We've got great coaching staff and we've got talented young people representing us, but we want to pair that with an incredible game day and incredible fan experience.

And then over the course of the entire academic year, have a situation where we're pushing volume and we can create resources over volume and not have to be gouging on ticket prices, parking. You know, we've cut our parking prices in half. We're lowering the prices of our concessions because we see more value in playing the long game of making a game day enjoyable, easy to navigate, affordable and energetic and exciting. The combination of those things I think are more important than just pushing only ticket pricing or only one aspect of the operation.

BRODIE: You mentioned conference realignment. This is of course, ASU’s first year in the Big 12. How's that move going?

ROSSINI: It's been exciting, you know, it's, it's just given us a lot of exposure, a lot of additional opportunity to pursue this. Just this morning, we were studying our television ratings in the early part of the football season and when you're in a national conference, you know, we span as far east as Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, heavy concentration throughout Texas in the Midwest. And then obviously the four corner schools that we're joining with.

The benefit of the national conference is starting to bear some fruit where our television ratings are up about 152% year over year. And that's because our games are now on ESPN and Fox and those networks and they're not on a regional sports network. And so the national exposure has been an immediate benefit. And then even having football games in the state of Texas, you can't put a recruiting value on the chance to compete in these recruiting hotbeds in a state like Texas. And you know, in, in many different ways, we're starting to see the benefit of this national footprint, the exposure that we're able to create as a result of the distribution of the Big 12 and so, so far, so good.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Mark Brodie is a co-host of The Show, KJZZ’s locally produced news magazine. Since starting at KJZZ in 2002, Brodie has been a host, reporter and producer, including several years covering the Arizona Legislature, based at the Capitol.
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