WILL KSU FRANCHISE TAG THE AD AGAIN?
It’s 10 PM on July 1st. Do you know where your athletic director is?
Does Kennesaw State currently have an athletic director? That’s a serious question, one that I can’t believe we need to ask.
If universities could use the franchise tag, that’s essentially how AD Milton Overton’s contract has worked since 2019. He’s operated under a series of consecutive one-year, prove-it deals that were re-evaluated each summer. Strangely, an athletic department that loves a good press release never announced that it was triggering any of the prior option years.
KSU responded to an open records request this morning with the exact contract terms that have circulating for a few months. No new details were available since the last time this very serious journalism outlet checked in. OK then.
Maybe this is standard operating procedure for athletic administrations that I’m not smart enough to understand. Either way, one of these possibilities must be true:
Kennesaw State does not have an athletic director right now.
Kennesaw State has an athletic director working without a contract.
Kennesaw State re-signed an athletic director and wants to keep it secret.
Whatever the reason may be, all three of those doors seem less than ideal in the current climate. Overton’s latest one-year extension expired June 30th, one day before the radical change in college sports spurred by the House vs. NCAA settlement. For the uninitiated: Starting today, athletic departments have the ability to share revenue directly with student athletes, above the table. Kennesaw State and the rest of Conference USA — according to commissioner Judy MacLeod — have all opted in to the settlement and will distribute some level of direct payments moving forward.
Earlier this spring in a rare message to fans, Overton released an open letter to sorta-explain his new Owl Enhancement Fee, outlining a goal of an additional $1 million in revenue to support the new initiatives. There’s been no follow-up from Overton or public comment from the department since the settlement was formally approved on June 6.
Overton’s tenure in Kennesaw is tough to evaluate, even after nearly 8 years on the job. From an outside perspective, it’s impossible to say what role Overton truly played in the CUSA invite, but that upward mobility is a major win. He’s hit on a few key hires with the two men’s basketball coaches and Coe in baseball, making the NCAA tournament in both sports. Your mileage will vary on facilities and if they’re developing quickly enough. Still, the baseball stadium sounds like it’s close to the finish line and there’s some movement for the sports performance center. We don’t get many updates.
Has KSU clarified what’s going on with the changes in the football-specific building? Well…no. You can read between the lines on the new proposal to renovate existing office space by the practice field and see that as a cost-cutting measure to combat rising construction costs and preserve more money for revenue sharing.
Depending on perspective, you could argue that he’s done a nice job in challenging circumstances or that he’s an empty suit in the right place at the right time. KSU’s reluctance to offer long-term job security points toward the latter. Kennesaw’s state-run media apparatus doesn’t let much slip, so we’re stuck filling in the gaps with conjecture and rumors on nearly every topic. The if only you knew innuendo about the day-to-day operations always pop up during the Overton conversation. I find the veiled criticism exhausting, though, as there are never any names or specifics attached.
It’s still a safe bet that Overton returns, on another short-term deal at least. That doesn’t make the silence or lack of contract news any less strange. This feels extremely reckless on KSU’s part to continue through this transformative period with such a major question lingering over the athletic department - while acting like nothing’s happening. Today’s one of the most important days in college sports history, and we have no clue who’s calling the shots in Kennesaw at this point.
Back in December, Overton hired Jerry Mack as the second head coach in the football program’s history. Mack repeatedly touted the department’s “alignment” during his intro presser, even in the face of an opportunistic (and petulant) line of questioning from the AJC about facilities and investment. Are they really on the same page to that level? Maybe. I just know that’s exactly what I’d say to the media if my new athletic director, who mostly serves as a background player, just handed me the keys and promised to get out of the way.
That’s the irony of the whole Bohannon saga, which is the most notable moment of Overton’s time in Kennesaw thus far. KSU didn’t believe in the AD enough at the time to extend him long-term, and Overton used a coach he didn’t believe in as a crash-test dummy to join FBS on an expedited timeline with limited resources. Overton’s the one who gave Bohannon an extension in 2022, two years after the AD’s own cycle of one-year deals began. Leaving Bohannon to his own devices benefited both guys for quite some time, and then they could blame each other with conviction as to why the experiment didn’t work.
That controversy mostly blew over in the public eye, but could that power vacuum be a feature, and not a bug, of Overton’s managerial style? You have to wonder how laissez-faire leadership will play during the rev share era, as coaches in multiple sports fight even harder for the same pool of money - which now can they can direct deposit right into athletes’ accounts. Who’s at the top of the org chart making those decisions on allocating resources?
Overton closed out last month’s KSU Night alumni events hyping a Battery-esque plan to turn the area around Fifth Third Stadium into a mixed-use entertainment district. That idea was explained further by an inner-circle booster on a recent edition of the Owl Chat Podcast, a show that the university seemingly will not let any active players or coaches appear on. The full episode is worth a listen and will give Owls fans a decent amount of previously-unreported updates. One of those tidbits is that the athletic department - again, led by someone who may not even have a contract - wants to reach the P4 level someday. That part left me speechless.
It all calls Kennesaw State’s confusing PR strategy further into question. If KSU has such optimistic plans, why not talk about them in public in front of anything other than a paid audience? Why does a donor need to be the public messenger on this? Overton continues to shy away from media, even as athletic directors nationwide sit down for interviews to address the future of their programs and explain the House settlement to fans with itemized projections about the share each sport will receive.
Would that change if Overton gets some sort of job security? Press releases and marketing material constantly tell us about Kennesaw State’s bright future.
At some point, shouldn’t we hear from the guy shaping it?