In that antiquated system, coaches often raised much of the moneyâand spent a good deal of time doing it. âCoaches would have TV shows, and they would go out and solicit their supporters to buy ads,â said Mike Myers, a Dallas businessman who has been a major donor to UT athletics. âThere was the Darrell Royal Show , and that was a vehicle that earned him some extra money, and that is what most of the coaches did around the country. They had summer camps too, and they did all this stuff on their own. Instead of coaching, they would end up having to be businesspeople.â
Dodds dismantled that system. He did it over the protests of the people who ran the picnic fundraiser and everyone else with a stake in keeping things private. âThey said to me, âLook, this is the way we do business here. We have a picnic, the money goes into the bank, and we decide how to bonus the coaches,âââŹĹ â recalled Dodds. âI said, âWell, you canât do that.â They sent a letter of protest, saying how wrong I was.â He made UT one of the first schools to bring all of its sports fund-raising under the control of the athletics department. He was also among the first to support the notion that coaches were supposed to coach and not raise money and would instead be paid a single, quantifiable salary. âHis thrust was, letâs put everything on the table,â said Myers. âLetâs turn all of the cards over and let everybody see how much we are making and how much we are paying. This was the most significant change I had seen since I first got involved in UT sports, in 1968.â
Dodds called his new fund-raising arm the Longhorn Foundation, and he hired a team of professionals to run it. When he started it, in 1984, the foundation pulled in around $500,000 a year. Today it is the countryâs leading sports fund-raising operation, raking in $26 million in 2007ânearly a quarter of the total athletics budget. But that was just a warm-up for the changes Dodds would set in motion in the nineties.
Though Dodds will undoubtedly be remembered as an athletics director who ran a clean program and whose teams won a lot of games, he will primarily be known as a moneymaker, a revenue genius. His approach can be summed up this way: Strictly limit the number of teams (UT has only 20, though comparably sized Ohio State University fields 31); find a way to raise large amounts of cash on top of selling football tickets; and use that money to make your teams competitive by buying the best coaches, the most elaborate gyms, stadiums, locker rooms, equipment, and weight rooms and giving each team the maximum number of full scholarships. In other words: All University of Texas teams would receive the best and the most of everything. No teams would be dropped. There would be no loose floorboards or dog-eared carpets at the venues, no ânonrevenueâ teams driving themselves to games and eating peanut butter sandwiches, not a single coach who was not among the highest paid in his or her field. It meant that the womenâs rowing team, which produced exactly zero dollars from ticket sales, received the equivalent of twenty full scholarships and could routinely take more than thirty athletes to competitions two thousand miles away. What made this formula even more unusual was its goal: to allow every one of UTâs teams to compete for a national championship every year.
Doddsâs plan sounded almost utopian, and it would rely on an enormous amount of money. To get it he needed to commercialize his program in a way that only a handful of other schools were even contemplating. âCommercializingâ meant violating UT tradition by plastering the names and logos of corporations over scoreboards and stadiums and letting UTâs name be used for all sorts of promotions. Dodds had come to the idea slowly, after prodding from prominent boosters like billionaire Red McCombs, who owned the San Antonio Spurs and saw no reason why UT should not use the same moneymaking strategies the pros used, such as selling luxury suites and sponsorships. âAt the time [the early nineties] there was only one small sign on our scoreboard,â McCombs said. âI told him, âWe have to commercialize.â I told him I thought we had a quiet giant here.â
The strategy had a number of components: Unsheathe the weapon of corporate sponsorship, build large numbers of cash-generating luxury suites and expensive club seats, boost UTâs sagging television revenue, and expand his already prosperous private fund-raising operation. Doddsâs next move was to extricate UT from the doddering Southwest Conference. The University of Arkansas had fled to the SEC in 1992, leaving the SWC with only Texas schools: UT, Texas A&M, Baylor, Rice, Texas Tech, SMU, TCU, and the University of Houston. Because it was seen as a provincial conference, it was unattractive to television networks. That, in turn, meant that top prospects often chose to go to schools where they would get national exposure. âWe did not have a lot of money coming in from the conference,â Dodds said. âAnd we were losing our recruiting base. We were losing kids to Florida, Notre Dame, Florida State, and UCLA, and a lot of the players that beat us in football came from Texas.â
