Vols AD Danny White has earned Gators’ respect instead of their scorn | Commentary

There was a time not long ago when the Florida Gators scoffed at Danny White and the too-big-for-its-britches athletic program he was running at UCF.

The Gators, with all of their SEC money, prestige and overall athletic excellence, weren’t about to lower themselves and play UCF in football despite White publicly pestering UF athletic director Scott Stricklin.

Fast forward now to Saturday night, when White will be at the Swamp as the AD at Tennessee, where his 11th-ranked football team is a touchdown favorite over unranked UF and his athletic program has unseated the mighty Gators as the all-sports king of the SEC.

There was a time when I used to say that the SEC’s All-Sports Trophy should be named the “Jeremy Foley Cup” after the legendary UF athletic director who choreographed an athletic program that finished atop the SEC All-Sports standings 24 times in his 25 seasons.

White obviously has a million miles to go to catch Foley, but he’s off to a great start. The Vols had never won a SEC All-Sports Trophy until White arrived from UCF three years ago and now they’ve won two straight and just had the highest finish ever (No. 6) in the Learfield Directors’ Cup national standings.

“That was part of the attraction of coming to Tennessee,” White told me Tuesday. “This place has always valued winning across the board. Just look at Pat Summitt’s history in women’s basketball. We talk about excellence in everything we do. We have serious-minded men and women who want to make the most of themselves and compete at the highest level. If the Power-T brand is going to be on that jersey, we want to be really good. We want to win championships.”

I’ve always admired athletic programs such as Florida and Tennessee; programs that fund their softball teams and swimming teams at the highest possible level. Of course, most college sports fans only care about the football and men’s basketball teams, but ADs — at least the good ones — are trying to give all sports the attention and the money they need to thrive.

With conferences shifting and consolidating in their never-ending quest for the almighty TV dollar, we often talk about the insatiable greed in college athletics. So seldom do those of us in the media ever mention that all of this college football money isn’t just funding the football program; it’s also funding volleyball, gymnastics, track and field, lacrosse, etc., and has provided a college education to millions of young men and women throughout history.

UCF AD Terry Mohajir says it all the time and White reiterated it Tuesday: “College athletics is the biggest source of educational opportunities since the G.I. Bill.”

Tennessee, for instance, provides scholarships for 565 student-athletes and spent $110 million last year funding its 20 different sports programs — $47 million on football; $63 million on all of its other sports. In all, NCAA institutions provide more than $3.6 billion in athletic scholarships annually to about 180,000 student-athletes. Many of these athletes would never get a chance to go to college otherwise and 99.9% of them will never make a dime playing professionally.

So as much as we complain about college football coaches making $10 million a year, just remember that their programs are paying the bills for a $200 million-per-year corporation. If you hire a good football coach, it’s well worth the investment.

Which is why White is now at the top of the college AD world. When he was at Buffalo, he hired Lance Leipold who turned around the Bulls and is now in the process of rebuilding a once-moribund program at Kansas. White then moved to UCF, where he hired offensive whizzes Scott Frost and then Josh Heupel. He smartly took Heupel and his pyrotechnic offense with him to Tennessee.

White and Heupel stepped into a smoldering tire fire in Knoxville, where the football team had just completed its worst record (3-7) in more than 100 years and former coach Jeremy Pruitt was fired for a long rap sheet of NCAA recruiting violations. Sadly (and comically), even Pruitt’s wife Casey was cited by the NCAA for making illicit cash payments to recruits and their families.

Two years later under Heupel, the Vols finished last season at 11-2  and ranked No. 6 in the country with the highest-scoring offense in college football. Fundraising and booster contributions are now at an all-time high and the Vols sold out their allotment of more than 70,000 season tickets for only the second time in 22 years.

“Touchdowns are more fun to watch than the absence of touchdowns, I know that,” White said when asked what Heupel’s offense has done to ignite and excite Vol Nation. “Our football success and the passion of our fan base has been amazing.”

From the hiring of Heupel to the aggressive business and marketing plan he’s implemented, White has made no secret that he’s using the same “best practices” guidelines to rebuild Tennessee as he did to reinvent UCF.

The difference is he now has more TV money, more fans and more booster contributions to invest in the program.

Times and tax brackets have certainly changed.

The Gators used to look down their noses at Danny White.

Now they are looking up to him in the SEC standings.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2