Shalala For UW Athletic Director

It’s only a matter of time now until Chris McIntosh is fired as Wisconsin Athletic Director and walks away with over $3 million in an obscene contract buyout. I have two things to say about that. First, good riddance. And second, let’s hire Donna Shalala to replace him.

As far as I can tell Shalala is just sitting around waiting for something to do. She left her last job running the New School about a year ago and I don’t see any current employment. On a fixed income now, she might be looking for some extra cash to make ends meet.

Shalala, you’ll recall, was one of the UW Madison’s most dynamic chancellors. She served from 1988 to 1993, the first woman to lead a Big Ten school. It was Shalala who inherited the previous low point in Badger football history, the infamous Don Morton era. It was Shalala who convinced Pat Richter to leave a comfortable job in the corporate world to take on the shambles that was the UW Athletic Department under Elroy Hirsch. Richter found Barry Alvarez and everything turned around.

Shalala left the UW to work as a cabinet secretary for Bill Clinton and then wound up heading the University of Miami, where she again presided over a football powerhouse.

The woman is wicked smart, doesn’t suffer fools and is as tough as nails. She sees a successful athletic program in the broader context of selling the institution in a competitive world. For the record, I think she’s probably wrong about that. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are not football powerhouses and yet they seem to do okay. MIT, Columbia and the University of Chicago don’t even have football teams and yet they seem to survive somehow. Marquette quit football in 1960 and does alright. It’d be okay with me if the whole damn UW athletic program was replaced by a healthy intramural program.

But let’s return for now to the real world. Badger athletics won’t be abolished, so we need to make the best of it. Shalala, even at 84, is the right person to upend that whole cabal of arrogance and incompetence and replace it with strong leadership, accountability and at least some level of transparency.

I trust her to replace Fickell with somebody better. Okay, that’s a low bar, so let me restate it. I trust her to find somebody like Alvarez. That’s a very high bar.

But I also trust that she’ll clean up the ugly mess that McIntosh let fester in women’s basketball — his department is being sued by players who claim that the department didn’t act on their complaints about bullying by their coach. And I trust that she wouldn’t make dumb unforced errors like tearing up the personalized bricks in front of the old Shell and planning to toss them into a dumpster.

She’s also a realist. So, whether or not she likes the new era of NIL, I’m confident she’ll figure out a way to make it work for the UW. She might even lead the necessary reforms that move big time college sports to the orderly pro model with a players union and binding, fair contracts that protect both schools and athletes. Another problem with McIntosh is that he’s fought reforms at every step.

Like it or not, football is the money machine that feeds every other sport, save men’s basketball and maybe hockey. When it suffers everything suffers. And, frankly, it doesn’t help the city of Madison much either as a some part of our economy is linked to football games.

McIntosh has run all of this into the turf. It’s 1988 all over again. We need a savior. Back then the recovery started with Donna Shalala as chancellor. No reason she can’t do it again as athletic director.