Fly in Formation, Not in Lockstep 

Last month, I sat on the beach and watched flock after flock of pelicans pass over the water. Some flocks flew in a straight line and others formed a flying V. When the lead bird flapped its wings, the motion traveled through the formation. When it began to glide, each bird behind it followed. 

One particular flock especially caught my attention. One pelican trailed well behind the rest. It looked as though it was trying to catch up, yet every time the leader stopped flapping, the bird at the back stopped too. The distance never closed. 

I kept thinking about that bird because I recognized the pattern. 

It turns out pelicans aren’t just following each other for the sake of it. Brown pelicans commonly move low over the water while flying in unison, and research has found that formation flight can conserve energy. The shared rhythm serves the flock.  

College athletics needs a formation too. Conferences, national associations, and shared rules help schools coordinate competition and preserve the basic mechanics of college sports. A common direction still leaves room for different decisions. No two institutions have the same combination of resources, governance structure, donor base, media value, and tolerance for risk.  

The Distance Never Closes 

Twenty-two years ago, one of my first assignments after joining James Moore was to calculate the payout owed to a client’s terminated head football coach. Public reports show that Ron Zook had four years remaining at $450,000 per year, putting the obligation for the University of Florida at approximately $1.8 million. I remember looking at the calculation and thinking it was an extraordinary amount of money to pay someone who would no longer be working. At the time, it felt enormous. Today, it wouldn’t even make the headlines. 

In 2023, Texas A&M’s decision to fire Jimbo Fisher carried a reported obligation of more than $75 million. Two years later, 15 fired football coaches at public universities had accumulated reported buyouts approaching $228 million. LSU’s obligation to Brian Kelly alone was reported at $54 million. Contract offsets, mitigation clauses, and later settlements can change the final cash cost, but the scale is clear. 

Agents helped create leverage and turned individual contracts into market data. The contracts still had to pass through athletic directors, presidents, boards, and donor bases willing to accept the premise that losing a coach would cost more than protecting the institution from a bad outcome. Once one institution accepted a new reality, it became much easier for the next one to justify doing the same. 

It Doesn’t Stop There 

Facilities took a similar path. A new football operations center, locker room, or training facility created an advantage, so competitors built their own. Before long, yesterday’s differentiator became today’s expectation, and the next project had to be bigger, flashier, or more technologically advanced in the name of recruiting and competitive advantage. 

Then the recruiting arms race expanded well beyond facilities. Commercial flights became private charters. Private charters became helicopters landing at high schools. Recruiting departments grew and creative teams exploded. General managers, player personnel staff, and recruiting analysts became standard line items in athletics budgets.  

Conference realignment may be the clearest example of the flock in motion. We saw it in the early 2000s, and we have watched it happen again over the last few years. Each wave created a new hierarchy, a new set of perceived winners and losers, and another round of institutions evaluating whether they were in the right place. Others fought to preserve their position or improve it before the next domino fell. Few wanted to be the school left standing when the music stopped.  

At every stage, leaders could point to a peer and explain why the next investment felt unavoidable. That’s the danger of benchmarking. It tells you where you’re different, but it doesn’t tell you whether being different is actually a problem.  

Athlete compensation offers the latest version of that tension. College sports resisted direct payments for most of its modern history. The House settlement allowed participating schools to share up to approximately $20.5 million per year, with third-party NIL continuing outside the cap. Once the settlement took effect, hesitation gave way to planning. Many athletic departments prepared to fund the full cap, then looked at ways third-party activity could supplement it. It didn’t take long before the cap stopped feeling like a ceiling and started feeling like the starting point. 

None of these decisions were irrational on their own. That’s what makes them so easy to defend. It’s only when you step back that you realize the entire flock changed direction. 

Every New Trend Starts with One School 

Changing a position can reflect responsible leadership. Facts change, court decisions arrive, and competitive realities shift. Trouble follows when a rival’s announcement becomes more persuasive than an institution’s own analysis. A school may start by asking what level of athlete compensation it can sustain. Once a peer announces its plan, the question becomes whether the school can afford to appear less committed.  

The same pattern is now forming around commercial ventures, LLCs, and athletic foundations. Each university’s NewCo structure differs in ownership, tax status, governance, scope, and relationship to the university. Yet the headline travels faster than the details: They created an LLC. Should we create one too? That’s the wrong first question.  

A separate entity may provide flexibility, attract specialized expertise, or open new commercial opportunities. Revenue still has to come from somewhere, and a new organizational chart cannot substitute for a sound business plan. Before copying the structure, a university needs to understand why they’re doing it.  

These changes are also bringing different resumes into college athletics. Corporate executives, professional sports leaders, lawyers, and investment professionals carry experience the industry can use. And while they can see assumptions that insiders have stopped questioning, they can also underestimate how higher education works. Universities don’t make decisions the way Fortune 500 companies do. They answer to boards, presidents, faculty, students, donors, taxpayers, legislatures, public records laws—essentially a long list of stakeholders that don’t exist in most businesses.  

An accomplished executive may arrive ready to move quickly and discover that institutional trust takes time. The university may hire that person to challenge convention, then surround the hire with incentives that reward the same choices everyone else is making. Outside leaders have to bring urgency while learning what holds the institution together. Universities, in return, have to leave enough room for hard questions before the new hire is absorbed into the flock. 

So, Who’s Leading the Flock? 

The Big Ten and SEC commissioners are the most visible birds near the front. The ACC and Big 12 respond from their own positions. Within every conference, the largest brands influence the pace, while ambitious programs focus on being more relevant or attractive before the next media negotiation and round of realignment.  

But, neither the Power 4 conferences nor the marquee brands in their memberships are actually leading the flock. The fear of being left behind is. 

Fear compresses the time available for judgment. Decisions become signals to recruits, donors, media partners, and conferences. The ability to say, “We are doing it too,” starts to carry more weight than the underlying economics. Long-term obligations become easier to approve when the reputational cost of waiting feels immediate and the financial cost will arrive years later. 

The pelican at the back may be a recently promoted former Group of 6 program, a Power 4 school near the bottom of its conference, or an institution that moved solely on the last expensive idea everyone described as essential. It can’t catch up by doing everything the pelican in front of it does immediately after it does it. It can study what the leaders did, understand why they did it, and decide whether the same decision makes sense for its own institution. It can define success with enough confidence to invest when its strategy calls for investment and to glide when more spending would add little value. It can build a stronger brand without pretending it has another institution’s budget.  

Find Your Own Rhythm 

College athletics still needs the flock. The legal, political, and financial pressures surrounding the industry make coordinated movement essential. Lockstep begins when a school borrows another institution’s conclusion instead of doing its own work. There’s nothing wrong with learning from peers. That’s how industries improve. But there is something wrong with assuming their answer is automatically yours.  

I think again about the pelican at the back. I don’t want it to leave the formation, and it doesn’t need to pass every bird ahead of it. I would simply like to see it keep flapping for a little longer when the others begin to glide. Its position calls for a different rhythm, and it will never close the distance by waiting for the leader to tell it when to use its wings. 

Best practices are a great place to start, and they’re a terrible place to stop. In an industry where everyone is watching the flock, the real advantage comes from knowing when to keep using your own wings. The James Moore Collegiate Athletics CPAs and Consultants can help you evaluate how the next big idea in college athletics advances your institution’s strategy.