Mr. Phillips Goes To Greensboro

There are two ways you can write the epitaph for Jim Phillips’s tenure as the Athletic Director of Northwestern University.

The first is the way it will be told in his newly crafted bio as President of the ACC. It’s the same narrative as the Pete Thamel article that first announced the news that Phillips would be departing Northwestern.

Jim Phillips was a winner. He oversaw Northwestern as its football team turned from an easily-forgotten joke to a legitimate nationally relevant team year-in and year-out. He hired the man who ended the most embarrassing streak in college sports, Northwestern men’s basketball’s NCAA Tournament drought. 

He was a rainmaker, shepherding donors into funding the most opulent status symbol in the Big Ten, an all-glass, shimmering leviathan kissed by the waves of Lake Michigan, the $270 million Ryan Fieldhouse. Perhaps lip service will be granted to the recent success of the women’s basketball and soccer programs and the work Phillips did to lock up impressive Olympic sports coaches like Kelly Amonte Hiller (women’s lacrosse) and Kate Drohan (softball) (both began as head coaches in spring of 2002, before Phillips’s arrival). From a results perspective, though Northwestern is not yet Stanford across the board, it is better off than it was 13 years ago, especially as schools are starting to cut back on their lavish athletic spending. 

The second way is the way it will not be told nearly often or loudly enough.

Jim Phillips is the ur-athletic director. Northwestern’s success under him has been astounding, but the fact he has been so successful only serves to highlight the endemic flaws of college athletics.

Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure at Northwestern has been wildly successful, and Jim Phillips was able to keep him in purple through evermore byzantine machinations of money moving (remember those weird loans in his contract?). 

Fitzgerald’s tenure has also involved a unionization attempt that was squashed due to no small part thanks to Phillips’ actions.

Jim Phillips did hire Chris Collins who led Northwestern to the only NCAA Tournament in its history. Phillips’s partnership with Collins brought a radical reinvention of what the Northwestern basketball program looked like, and without those interventions, Northwestern would likely have remained an NIT-at-best program.

Northwestern men’s basketball also has gone through a number of hard-to-explain incidents that feel more than a little skeevy. Aaron Lieberman left the basketball program and had to sign non-disclosure agreements. A promising recruit had his acceptance revoked for reasons no one seems to know. There have also been waves of transfers out of the program from promising players. The Johnnie Vassar allegations have never really been resolved or even dealt with in passing by anyone in the Northwestern administration. How one can have the comedic level of arrogance required to screw up forging a student’s time card that the student’s name wasn’t even spelled right is a quandary that sits frustratingly unanswered.

There were other issues in the athletic department too, including the softball program, where significant allegations were made and little was done institutionally. A wrestling coach left overnight on the brink of the season starting without any offering of an explanation. There is smoke, or at least a slight haze, that sits over the Evanston coast.

There is a level of institutional cover that Jim Phillips was offered and was happy to take advantage of by working at a private school. Northwestern and Phillips were not subject to FOIA investigations, a dull object that can still provide tidbits that can sink even the most powerful people in college sports (et tu, David Brandon?). President Morton Schapiro was his most ardent backer. His job security was never once in doubt. 

Phillips too benefitted from working at a school that cultivates an uncomfortably friendly relationship with the media that covers it. No one will ever make their Big Break by being the one who breaks the cover of a scandal involving a little private school that does some Big Ten athletics on the side. Neither of the major Chicago newspapers even have dedicated Northwestern beat writers this year. Instead, those who do cover the team seem to cuddle up to the administration, pick up some “scoops” colored by the party line, and leave it there. Most of the folks who have covered the team historically even have a Medill degree somewhere in their office. The rest of the space is filled by student journalists who use their spare time to give some news and analysis to the extremely small subsection of America that cares about Northwestern. 

That lack of curiosity and that opacity has helped Phillips and Northwestern continue to cultivate the appearance of an athletic department that represents the very best of the student-athlete ideal. Northwestern sits high on its hill, pointing to its astounding graduation rates, its exemplary students who participate in the community in inspiring ways, and show to the world that you can indeed compete for championships while serving your athletes world-class educations that prepare them for life off the field. 

I’m not so shortsighted to ignore that a good chunk of that last paragraph rings true. Northwestern under Jim Phillips is not a Big Bad in collegiate sports. Every year it seems there is another horrifying scandal that beggars belief and Northwestern’s missteps pale in comparison to so much of what is uncovered every season (hello, Michigan State). Shoot, Art Briles may have a head coaching job again next year. There are bigger targets. 

And it is true, objectively, that Jim Phillips has been maybe the best athletic director in the country over the 13 years he took the helm of Northwestern sports. It’s also true that Phillips genuinely cares about Northwestern’s athletes and fans. 

However, I hope that Jim Phillips’ tenure shows how stunningly empty an achievement “being the best athletic director” is. 

The job description of a power conference athletic director is to sell the con of amateur athletics as part of a grand mission exalting the university to the richest people you can find who have any interest in your school’s athletics program in order for them to open their checkbook for you. After taking that money, you build fabulously elaborate buildings, like lakeside practice facilities and basketball arenas with craft beer on tap to make it look like your mission is working on a zero-profit margin. Then you take that zero-profit margin balance sheet, show it to the richest people you can find who have feigning interest in your athletics program, and show how your work is upholding the grand mission of the school. Meanwhile, your school struggles under serious budget problems, lays off personnel every year, and generally fails to pay workers a fair share as coaches rise to become some of the highest-paid employees in the country. Not to mention the “amateur” athletes themselves, who constantly struggle with grinding workloads and physical and mental health issues for the athletic director’s benefit. 

Repeat as necessary.

Jim Phillips was extremely good at that job. The skills that job requires are not the skills that align with doing the greatest good for the greatest number. 

We all sell a bit of our soul every time we go to work. I’ve worked on projects for clients that had missions I didn’t think were especially altruistic. Were I a better person, maybe I would’ve walked away from those positions. We’ve got our price. The price for being an athletic director, though, is an especially high one to pay. I don’t get the feeling it was a decision Jim Phillips ever struggled with.

I will not miss Jim Phillips, even though I am fully aware that his replacement will not be as skilled as Jim Phillips. I am even aware that the next Northwestern athletic director will be no more altruistic than their predecessor. He or she might even be demonstrably worse than Jim Phillips at the “don’t commit heinous acts” part of the job. 

That being said, Jim Phillips was not good at hiding what he was doing if you knew what to look for. In the Jungian sense, his shadow – the unconscious, hidden truth of his enterprise – was never far removed from his comportment. There was always, from day one, a degree of ambitious politician/used car salesman to the way he handled himself. The way he always found himself on television cameras next to someone important. The way how everything he did and everything he said, pointed toward his career aspiration of leading the NCAA. 

The psychological profile of someone who wants that job as badly as Jim Phillips does strikes me as a similar profile to that of someone who wants to be head of the CIA. I don’t mean that as a compliment. Nonetheless, he’s one step closer now. 

Jim Phillips got exactly what he wanted out of Northwestern. Northwestern got everything it wanted out of Jim Phillips. What we won’t ever know is what Northwestern would have looked like if there was an athletic director who wanted to investigate their own house when things started going awry. We won’t get to know what college football would look like with a team that successfully unionized. 

Those are both huge missed opportunities. Those missed opportunities could have made the Northwestern experience richer, and even could have rapidly changed the entire sporting landscape for the better. To the ACC, they were examples of Jim Phillips being a Seasoned Leader who knows how to Handle Adversity and Bring People Together. They were obstacles avoided rather than challenges that were failed to be met. 

I don’t expect the next Northwestern athletic director to be someone who would have the heart to act differently than Phillips. That, I fear, is a bar too high. Short of that, I hope the next athletic director makes it easier for me to forget how ugly the sports I love to watch are. 

If even that bar is too high, I hope they lean in! Wear a monocle, sport a curly handlebar mustache, and carry around big sacks of money with $20 bills flying out the top of them as they scurry around Evanston in trolley cars. 

At least then we could all know exactly what we’re looking at without having to pretend it’s something it’s not.