A man stopped Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois in a Tucson coffee shop Friday morning, introduced himself and said, "You're doing a great job; I'm a big fan of yours. Keep it up."
Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois.
Reed-Francois celebrates her second anniversary as Arizona's AD this week, and oh, what a story she could tell about those two work-is-never-done years since arriving from her job as Missouri's AD the first week of March 2024.
She inherited a stripped-bare football program six weeks after Jedd Fisch’s exit. She inherited a women's basketball program in free-fall, a swimming program that was underwater and a cross country program that had gone flat.
More? Reed-Francois took on a massive budget deficit of close to $50 million. She needed to rebuild the front office staff, create a new radio/TV broadcast and marketing enterprise, work a 10-year deal with Nike, and somehow be the first Arizona AD to produce $20.5 million per year for revenue sharing for Wildcat athletes.
Among other things.
Rather than attempt to take credit for surviving two of the most challenging years in the history of the UA athletic department, crowing that it has been a job well done, Reed-Francois instead labels those two years as "stabilizing."
She has raised roughly $5 million a year combined for naming rights to McKale Center and Arizona Stadium, and her next act will be to sell advertising patches for game-day uniforms for all Arizona sports, a transaction that could mean as much as $2 million more per year. To work toward that $20.5 million per-year plateau in revenue sharing, she even sold the name of her job for $5 million. Her official title is now the R. Ken Coit Director of Athletics.
Somehow, she has found time to be the president of the FBS Athletic Directors Association. Fun? She runs about 25 miles per week.
The challenges of her first two years at Arizona are not unprecedented, but they put her in select company with two esteemed predecessors who faced and overcame similarly daunting challenges, Dick Clausen and Cedric Dempsey.
From 1959-61, Clausen inherited a UA athletic department that was in the low-level Border Conference with historically bad football (1-8-1 and 3-7) and basketball (4-22, 8-17) teams. Clausen helped to create the Western Athletic Conference, began work on the creation of McKale Center, hired a football coach, Jim LaRue, who led the Wildcats to an 8-1-1 record in 1961 and moved Arizona into a higher level of sports, replacing Hardin-Simmons and West Texas State on the football schedule with such opponents as Iowa and Missouri. Clausen was also the first UA athletic director to actively work on civil rights, ultimately hiring the nation's first Black head coach in Division I sports, Willie Williams.
From 1983-85, Dempsey worked magic on an athletic department that was on NCAA football probation, with a first-time-ever budget deficit and a basketball program that went 4-24. Dempsey hired Lute Olson, imposed a priority seating tax on football and basketball tickets — the first such creative money-raising move in UA history — and found a way to absorb women's sports into the previously all-men's athletic department. He oversaw a total shift in the rivalry with ASU, as the Wildcats took command of football and basketball with the Sun Devils, who had ruled both sports for almost a quarter century.
Reed-Francois' first two years can match Clausen and Dempsey and then some.
Today's athletic directors are managers of nine-figure budgets in an industry where media-rights deals, revenue-sharing, and NIL deals are formidable for any school not named Georgia, Alabama, Michigan or Ohio State. Each day can be a high-pressure balancing act to win championships, assuage administrators and manage a pro-style front office all while keeping athletes safe and productive as you manage the never-ending transfer portal. Every decision impacts your school's future and your own.
Reed-Francois has proved her worth by making a series of tough choices, each that affects the school's budget and on-field success. Getting everyone on your side, buying in, is not easy.
Unlike the guy in the coffee shop, not everyone on campus and in the UA sports community is a Reed-Francois advocate. She hasn't been afraid to make sometimes unpopular decisions. Yet she put the UA in a much better position than it was in five, 10, 15 and 20 years ago.
Dick Clausen and Cedric Dempsey would approve.
