My Two Cents: Glass Can Walk Out the Door With Head Held High

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — It's hard to really quantify what makes a good college athletic director these days. There's so much that goes into the job that it's difficult to gauge who gets credit and who gets blame in a business — and that's exactly what Indiana University Athletics is — that is so wide-ranging.

Fred Glass announced his retirement Monday as Indiana's athletic director, effective at the end of the school year. He can leave with his head held high, because he brought stability to a department in disarray, and he had the right vision for the direction it should take going forward.

He has accomplished a lot, and deserves praise for a job well done.

When you run the athletics department at a major college, your successes and failures are often determined by the wins and losses of your football and men's basketball teams, but there's so much more to it than that, especially at Indiana.

Much, much more.

The best thing Glass did was stop the craziness on 17th Street. Prior to his hiring, Indiana had five athletic directors in eight years and, from the top down, the department was a mess. Glass stopped that.

"Just let that sink in a little bit, five athletic directors in eight years,'' Glass said during Monday afternoon's press conference.. "I can't even imagine how long it takes you to get to certain things and sustain initiatives and get things done, and I think that had created, frankly, a lot of dysfunction and morale challenges. People thought that was normal. It's not normal.

"And I thought to myself, I may not be the best AD ever, and I may not know what I'm doing, but I can be here. Woody Allen said 90 percent of life is showing up, and I think there's a lot to that. I thought longevity would be helpful. I wanted to stay for a while.''

And he has. A lot of his key projects — like fundraising ventures and facilities upgrades — are concluding this year, Indiana's 200th. The timing seems right, Glass says, to take the next steps in his life. He's got grandchildren to play with now, something he didn't have when he was hired in 2008, and he's ready for something different than the "all-in, all the time'' job of a college athletic director.

He has, as he said, "fulfilled his commitment.'' He sure has, and then some.

Here's are the three biggest accomplishments in the Fred Glass era:

1. A much-needed upgrade in facilities

When Glass arrived in 2009, Indiana's facilities were a joke. Even iconic Assembly Hall, the symbol of the university in many ways, was in desperate need of a facelift. If you take the storied basketball arena out of the equation, Indiana had the worst facilities in the Big Ten, outside of tiny private school Northwestern. And it wasn't even close.

Glass changed that, and he did it with a massive fund-raising effort that paid for all of it without any university money or student fees. There is no denying that Glass and his staff are the greatest fund-raisers in Indiana history. The bill is pushing $250 million, and all of it needed to be spent.

Memorial Stadium looks like a real college football home now, and all it really lacks now are people in the seats. The Assembly Hall remodel was excellent, because it added new things while keeping the old-school charm of the building. Baseball and softball's new stadiums are first-class, as is Armstrong Stadium, the new golf course, Wilkinson Hall and on and on.

Indiana has nothing to be ashamed of now when it facilities. We owe that to Glass for getting it done, for convincing the university higher-ups that it was necessary and raising the money to do so. We can be proud.

2. Getting football right — finally

The biggest risks Glass has had to take have been with Indiana's football program, because it means the most. Glass the businessman knows that the Hoosiers' entire athletic program would benefit greatly from a successful football program, something that's eluded the school for a century, basically.

Glass hired Kevin Wilson, which was the right thing at the time, but he also fired him when it was definitely the right thing to do, too. He put his full faith in Tom Allen, a man who had never been a college head coach, because in his gut he knew that Allen could change the culture here, and improve the talent level at the same time.

That hire could have blown up in his face, but it hasn't. In Allen's third year, Indiana went 8-4 this season, and the eight wins were the most since 1993. As one of Glass' final acts, Allen was awarded with a seven-year, $27.3-million contract extension, the largest contract in school history.

"Part of my pitch to the search committee (in 2008) was that Indiana's got to get football right. For a variety of reasons, we needed to get football to be excellent,'' Glass said. "It's important for football's sake, but football reflects disproportionately on your school whether you like it or not. (Former IU president) Herman B Wells said, 'if we're going to participate in something, we should be excellent at it,' and we had not been excellent at football.

"I think football is also important for the department because it can be a huge revenue generator not only to reinvest in football, but to reinvest in our other sports as well, and we have inventory. We have opportunity to generate more money. I've often said that, if we just filled the small stadium that we have, we'd get $7 million or $8 million to drop to our bottom line, which really makes a difference on our budget. So it is really important for the department.''

Football is headed in the right direction for sure. Indiana is still dead last in the Big Ten in ticket revenue from football, and by a staggering amount from the top of the league to the bottom. Closing that gap even a little bit would help a bunch with Indiana's financial well being. Glass — and Allen — have that finally heading in the right direction.

3. Fixing academics and IU's reputation

Fred Glass arrived in Bloomington on the heels of the Kelvin Sampson basketball debacle, which left Indiana to suffer through some major NCAA violations, something unheard of the IU's history. Glass not only cleaned that up, but he also set the tone for improving academics across the board throughout the department.

"When I came here, I came here because we had a major infractions case where our most prominent coach didn't prioritize athletics, and broke the rules,'' Glass said Monday. "It's not a coincidence that my No. 1 and No. 3 priorities are following the rules, and then only after the wellness of the kids, academics.

"That sounds super pedestrian, but if you have those basic rules in order, they are super helpful when you're in a situation — a budget question, a crisis, or whatever — and you say, if academics is really our third priority and it's ahead of athletics, then we're going to do this and not that. "I'm really gratified that we went from a graduation success rate shortly after I was here that I think was about 74 percent to one that, as we sit here today, is 91 percent. That means a lot to me, and that we've never had any major rules violations while I was here. We've accomplished those goals, I suppose.''

Finding that overall grade is difficult

As the athletic director at Indiana, the most important thing you can do in that job is help hang a sixth national championship banner in Assembly Hall. That didn't happen, of course, but Glass did remind everyone that one of his favorite moments was seeing Indiana win its EIGHTH national title in men's soccer under Todd Yeagley, Glass' first hire.

If you were grading Glass, the only thing that stops him from getting an A is the lack of success — read a national title — in basketball. It is Indiana's flagship program, and it's been floundering for a while.

What's Glass' role in it? It's been substantial. Tom Crean was the right hire at the time, and Glass even made a point of praising Crean Monday for fixing the dumpster fire that Sampson created. Glass reminded every that Crean had revived the program and even had the Hoosiers ranked No. 1 again.

But Glass also had to fire Crean three years later despite his two Big Ten titles, and many say Glass waited a year too long. Other critics say he made the wrong choice with Archie Miller, who's in his third year now and still hasn't played in an NCAA Tournament game at Indiana.

Glass reiterated Monday that he still thinks Miller will do great things in Bloomington, but for that, we'll have to wait and see.

In either case, whoever replaces Glass will have enormous shoes to fill. His decade-plus at the helm has been mostly good, and Indiana is better for it, for him having been here.

"You can't look at somebody else to tell you what to do,'' Glass said. "You've got to have confidence in your own abilities and make the best decision you think you can, and do what you think is right because, like Eleanor Roosevelt says, you'll be criticized no matter what you do, so you might as well do the thing you think is right.

"Don't try to placate the mob. Don't try to avoid criticism. Do what you think is right and if it turns out not to be right, at least you were trying to do the right thing.''

.He has. Kudos to a job well done.