Understanding College Athletics: What Campus Leaders Need to Know About College Sports

The business and politics behind campus sports. In many states, the highest-paid public employee is not a governor or a university president, but a football coach. Yet most senior campus leaders rise through academic or administrative pathways that leave them with little preparation for overseeing athletics. In Understanding College Athletics, Karen Weaver offers a clear, practical account of how intercollegiate athletics functions as a complex enterprise with far-reaching implications for institutional reputation, finances, governance, and student experience. Weaver explains how athletics departments are structured, how budgets are built, where legal and compliance risks arise, and why athletics decisions reverberate across enrollment management, advancement, facilities planning, and alumni relations. Written for presidents, provosts, deans, financial officers, trustees, and other senior leaders, the book emphasizes oversight rather than operations. Weaver equips readers to ask informed questions, evaluate claims made in the name of competitive success, and understand how athletics aligns—or fails to align—with institutional mission and values. The book covers a wide range of topics, including financial partnerships and private equity, the student-athlete experience, donor influence, media and branding pressures, and the rapidly changing regulatory landscape shaped by NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) policy, antitrust litigation, and NCAA restructuring. At a moment when college athletics faces unprecedented scrutiny and instability, Understanding College Athletics serves as a working handbook for campus leaders who can no longer afford to treat sports as someone else's responsibility.