One of Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois‘ first moves at the UA was to eliminate the seven-member Learfield group that performed marketing and advertising for football, basketball and baseball. She was widely criticized for firing the Learfield crew; an organization that serves about 140 NCAA athletic departments. Reed-Francois hired her own crew, calling it Arizona Sports Enterprises, and said it pocketed 114% of what the Learfield group earned the previous year.
What did she see that the previous UA administration did not? Learfield received 34% of the profit from UA marketing and advertising. Now that money, probably about $3 million a year, stays in-house.
In a recent podcast with JohnWallStreet of New York City, Reed-Francois said her “fiscal discipline and revenue capture” has one purpose: “Our job is to create reasons for people to care,” she said.
UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois addresses the media and other attendees at a news conference previewing the 2025 football season at Arizona Stadium.
Reed-Francois’ latest “revenue capture” was to work with UA alumnus R. Ken Coit, a 1960s UA pharmacy grad and investment billionaire. He donated $5 million to the athletic department last week. The UA will now refer to Reed-Francois’ position as the “R. Ken Coit Director of Athletics.”
Although Big 12 rivals ASU, Utah, BYU and Colorado have yet to sell “naming rights” to their AD position, it is nothing new in college athletics. The old Pac-12 started that sort of revenue generation at UCLA and Stanford in 2019. That’s when UCLA’s athletic director became the “Alice and Nahum Lanier Director of Athletics,” named for Bruin alumnus Nahum Lanier and his wife. The family earned its money in the industrial warehouse industry.
At about the same time, Stanford sold naming rights to its AD position by getting Cardinal alumnus Steven Kenninger, a Stanford Law School grad and investment billionaire, to donate enough to call the Stanford AD position the “Jaquish and Kenninger Director of Athletics.”
Reed-Francois told JohnWallStreet that “philanthropy is up 47% at the UA.” In less than two years since being hired away from Missouri, Reed-Francois has eliminated talk of an overwhelming athletic department deficit and continues to find new ways to pay the bills.
