Babcock is a traditional college athletics director, meaning he came up in the traditional structure and learned to do the job the traditional way. What that means, generally speaking, is that he's more or less doing the same thing that a high school athletics director would be doing, but with a much higher public profile, much larger budget, and more sports. For some aspects of a big-time college athletics department, that skill set is still very important. But not for the most important aspect - football. Football drives the bus at any big-time college AD. College men's basketball, the NCAAT notwithstanding, is largely a niche product, and everything other sport, including women's basketball (no matter how hard they try to force it down people's throats now) is an ultra-niche product consumed only by die hard followers of certain schools. College football has always been a big deal, but it's now morphed into something else entirely. What was once the highest profile extracurricular activity at most schools has now become the second biggest TV sports entertainment product in the country, right after the NFL, and is worth multiple billions of dollars annually. You cannot have a glorified high school athletics director at the very top of what is, in practice, an entertainment company whose bread and butter is providing an entertainment product for TV. Once you understand this, you will understand why these new AD hires (and, in some cases, conference commissioners) have pro sports organization, legal, entertainment, and marketing backgrounds, and haven't worked their entire careers in college athletics departments. I hate it for Babcock, and others like him, but that's the way it is. It's a bad time to be part of the old guard, because the old ways are no longer the most crucial skillset for an athletics director, or whatever you want to call the person in charge of a university athletics department, at the highest level of the game. ** Edited by Baltimore_Hokie at 8/1/2025, 4:27:42 PM