AD Burnout Is the Headline — But Disengagement Is the Bigger Story

In August 2025, AthleticDirectorU (ADU) published the results of its second industry-wide burnout survey — rigorous work, a validated instrument, thousands of respondents — and the industry's response was a fraction of what the findings deserved. I came across it recently, which surprised me given how squarely it sits in my world, and I keep thinking about the gap between what the data said and how little conversation followed. Thousands of DI administrators told the industry, with hard numbers, that they’re in worse shape now than they were at the height of COVID — and the industry's attention was on realignment and rev-share math. Maybe that's its own data point.

Since my hunch is this research is “new news” to you, too, like it was for me, here’s a quick overview of what the survey did, and what it found:

ADU used the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI), a validated 16-item instrument that occupational psychologists have relied on for decades. The OLBI measures two separate things: first exhaustion, i.e. the physical and cognitive fatigue of carrying too much; and second, disengagement, the slower process of distancing yourself from work that has stopped making sense to you. If you look at the results of those two dimensions side by side, a story shows-up that the word "burnout" flattens. Exhaustion numbers barely moved from 2022. Disengagement is what soared — the share of administrators in the high-risk range jumped from 61.2% to 77.8% in three years, and that single shift is carrying nearly all of the overall increase. Administrators are now scoring in the same territory as healthcare workers. I know many people won’t like hearing this, but leaders in college sports should NOT be feeling the same kind of emotional and cognitive distance as underpaid and overworked humans who are literally saving lives.

The distinction between burnout and disengagement matters because the two conditions have different causes, and the fixes for one do almost nothing for the other. In the research tradition that OLBI comes from, exhaustion is what rising demands produce. Disengagement is what happens when resources — autonomy, role clarity, support, the sense that your judgment counts for something — fall behind those demands, and stay there.

I don’t think anyone can deny that the demands on ADs and coaches have exploded since the start of the NIL era. Athletic departments have absorbed payroll functions, cap management, GM-style roles, and a dramatically heavier athlete-support mandate than ever — essentially overnight, and often by court settlement. (What's happened to the demands on athletes themselves is a whole separate piece, and equally as important.) But here's the crack in the interpretation of the data: if demand alone were the story, exhaustion would be the number that’s spiking. Instead, it's flat. The number that has moved is the one that tracks the resource side of things — and what it's showing is that the resources ADs receive haven't kept up with what they're being expected to handle, because the league, school, and departmental structures that should be able to deliver them were never rebuilt to match the new reality. (Some might argue, how could they be rebuilt, when things continue changing almost daily? That, right there, might be the biggest fracture of all.)

Coaches, for example, are also now supposed to function as Chief Revenue Officers. New legal requirements keep being passed down through schools, but with no clear ownership attached to their fulfillment. Decision rights were handed to administrators who don’t have the full picture of what’s happening on their own courts, pitches, and pools. And all this was set into motion without any of the change management or organizational development work that would be absolutely crucial for a wholesale transition like this in any other industry.

And the changes keep coming at a whiplash-inducing pace: realignment waves, the ACC settlement, a relaunched Pac-12, a bipartisan federal framework moving through the Senate (as of this writing) that would rewrite the rules again. All of this means that there’s no "after the dust settles, we can finally address this” date to be pinned on anyone's calendar. Change and uncertainty are now as much a part of the college sports landscape as the games themselves. ADs, coaches, scouts, agents, athletes — the entire ecosystem — is operating under these conditions without even a single page of a playbook, in a realm where smart, strategic playbooks are literally the difference between being celebrated as a hero or becoming obsolete.

Most industries’ instincts, when data like this circulates, are to reach for wellness programming: resilience training, mental health resources, an app, a speaker. Those are recovery tools, and while they have their place, they’re most effective for treating exhaustion. They don't touch disengagement, because you can't rest your way back into work that no longer makes sense, or resources that can’t keep up with demands.

Organizational research has names for what's happening here. William Bridges — the organizational development (OD) consultant whose Managing Transitions has been a change-management standard for over three decades — spent a career studying the difference between change and transition. What he found is that change is the event itself; transition is the human process of letting go of an old identity and finding your footing in a new one. When an organization manages the change event (press releases! rules!) but skips addressing the transition (and I think most people would agree that college sports is now a legitimate business entity, run with profit-driven logic), the kind of disengagement uncovered in the ADU study should be pretty well expected.

Michael Cross, the Southern Conference commissioner, described the crux of the situation plainly in ADU's own write-up: people who entered college athletics to mentor younger folks now spend their days on transfer windows, compensation, and attorneys, with a "low locus of control due to booster, regulatory, and organizational factors." Locus of control is a concept that refers to whether you believe the results of your work depend on what you do, or on forces beyond your reach. When your best decision can be undone overnight by a booster, a lawsuit, or a rule change, the honest answer drifts toward the second — and people don't stay invested in work where their own judgment and experience have stopped mattering.

In workplaces, your locus of control is heavily shaped by the structure around you. So is role clarity. So is decision authority. The ADU data and decades of organizational development wisdom are all pointing at the design of the college sports machine itself — at how AD jobs and departments are built — as both the source of the damage we’re seeing right now, and the only place meaningful repair can actually happen.

I recognize this pattern because I've already lived through a complete run of it. I came to this conversation through a side door. I played college hockey at Boston University, then spent twenty-two years in advertising and marketing — an industry that ran this exact experiment a decade ahead of college sports. Relentless margin pressure, jobs that doubled without anyone redesigning them, and a wellness response that never touched the structure underneath. (We got the meditation apps. The utilization targets stayed exactly where they were.)

Advertising and college sports share another structural feature, too: they're sparkly, movie-set, dream-job industries. Both attract a constant line of eager young professionals who are ready and willing to take your job tomorrow, and everyone in the building knows it. That surplus lets leadership keep salaries down and build workloads up (it’s worth noting that ADU's own respondents named low compensation and a perceived lack of respect as top stressors), while also adding a layer of fear to the disengagement recipe. People who feel replaceable don't push back on broken structures. They go quiet and start scanning for the exit. I watched this happen firsthand for two decades — initially with colleagues, and eventually with myself.

I should also tell you about my own record here, because it's the strongest evidence I have about what actually works, and what’s just a band-aid. I built an employee wellbeing initiative at a national agency that earned real recognition, including a Gold Bell Seal from Mental Health America, and an international workplace award. But the approaches that garnered these major accolades still weren't enough. I did what the agency would allow, which turned out to be programmatic: support, education, resources. The structural work — revising processes, rethinking how we measured utilization, redesigning job roles and expectations — was largely off-limits. The program helped people cope with conditions that kept producing the thing they were coping with. I won awards for a wellbeing program, and I'm the one telling you programs aren't enough.

These days, my work lives inside college sports. My company, WIN | WIN, is agency-adjacent — we build social-impact brand partnerships and educational opportunities with athletes at the center. We talk to a lot of ADs and coaches, and the existential question they’re all wrestling with is the same: how do we keep our program funded and our athletes protected, advocated for, and prepared for life-after-sport at the same time? A checked-out staff can't answer that. Athlete support runs on staff capacity, and capacity is the first thing disengagement eats.

So what does the structural reboot look like in practice? It’s less complicated than you'd think. It starts with questions most departments haven't stopped long enough to ask. When revenue sharing arrived, whose job absorbed payroll — and did anything come off that person's plate? Who owns athlete support in your department right now: is it one accountable role that has adequate resources to succeed, or four offices that each hold a piece without any defined responsibilities? If you mapped where the strain is being felt the most, would it match the people who've been frustrated enough to say something out loud, or would you also notice that some of your highest-performing staff have slowly gone quiet? These aren't culture-committee questions. They're structural design questions, and design questions have design answers. You can redraw and clarify decision rights. You can rebuild roles around the work as it exists now, with full acknowledgement that you might need to rebuild again in a month. You can surface invisible (or visible but ignored) loads that many individuals are carrying, and rebalance or reprioritize.

Oh, and there’s also a really fantastic resource and capacity solution that’s been hiding in plain sight: many of the colleges and universities struggling with overburdened athletic departments also run graduate sport management programs, which happen to be full of the exact eager talent I described earlier. Right now, that eagerness mostly gets spent on underpaid (or often entirely unpaid) grunt work, when it gets channeled anywhere at all. Structured properly — with real roles, real learning loops, real responsibility with supervision, and not at the expense of existing experienced staff, but as a perpetual support system — it's a capacity-expansion pipeline that also builds the industry's next generation of adaptable and innovative leaders.

None of these (the redrawn decision rights, the rebuilt roles, the grad talent pipeline) is a clean, straight line fix, because the targets keep shifting. But that's not a reason to wait. Waiting assumes stability is coming. And we all know, far too well by this point, that it probably isn't.

The 2025 ADU study measured the implications of these last five years with more rigor and objectivity than this industry usually applies to itself, and then the news cycle moved on. But the findings really deserve more attention, and inarguably, much more of a response. The honest one starts with admitting that while ADs’ jobs have significantly changed, the structures around them haven't, and that no amount of programming or “buckle-down and we’ll get through it!” pseudo-encouragement will close that gap. The work has to be redesigned, from the very top of the leadership pyramid to the players in the locker room. In most departments, nobody has ever been given the opportunity to try. But that opportunity costs nothing to create — and the departments that embrace it first will be the ones who write the (adaptable) playbooks that everyone else is waiting for.

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Amy Small is the cofounder of WIN | WIN, a sports and social impact agency that brings athletes, brands, and nonprofits together to build positive legacies through sport. She is also an organizational design consultant who spent two decades as a creative executive inside high-pressure industries, and is currently conducting academic research on structural implications for leadership self-trust.