Oregon State University will play its first game of the new college football season next Saturday.
The Beavers will also be competing this year in an expanded Pac-12 Conference that features six other football teams joining OSU and Washington State University. Gonzaga is also now a member of the Pac-12, competing in basketball and other sports.
The Pac-12’s new roster brings some relief for the future of the 110-year-old athletic conference.
OSU and WSU were the only teams left in the Pac-12 after the 2023 football season following the departure of the Oregon Ducks, Washington Huskies and eight other teams for other conferences.
Fans will be able to see all of the Pac-12 football games this season on broadcast TV or via streaming under media distribution deals the conference secured with CBS, The CW, CBS Sports and USA Network.
Kevin Griffin is vice president and director of athletics at OSU. He joins us to talk about the new Pac-12 and the team’s prospects this season under new head football coach JaMarcus Shephard.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Pac-12 Athletic Conference imploded in 2023. The Oregon Ducks, the Washington Huskies, and eight other teams fled to other conferences. That left Oregon State University and Washington State University as the only teams. They finally have some company. Six more football playing schools have joined them, and the Pac-12 has essentially been reborn. OSU will play its first game of the new college football season next Saturday. The school also has a new vice president and director of athletics. His name is Kevin Griffin, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Kevin Griffin: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Miller: You were not at Oregon State when the Pac-12 imploded. You were at Ohio State, which is the conference that took in the Universities of Oregon and Washington that I mentioned earlier. What do you remember about that time?
Griffin: Yeah, well, it was certainly a weird time. It was odd to say the least. I happen to have grown up here in the Pacific Northwest, in Seattle, and so I grew up with the Pac-10 and then the Pac-12 and then off to college at Ohio State. And then, as you mentioned, my last stop of my career was back at Ohio State. And I just remember that moment in time where it not only felt unfair, but it felt unjust to a number of the schools, particularly Oregon State and Washington State, who were left holding the bag. Obviously I had a different perspective sitting at Ohio State at the time.
Miller: Right. Yeah, what was your perspective there?
Griffin: Oh, the perspective there was, it’s a capitalistic market, right, and we’re trying to do all that we can to create the best enterprise available so that we can fund athletics and in that case for Ohio State and take care of all 36 of our sports and over 1,000 student athletes and then the rest of the Big Ten Conference.
Miller: And compete against the SEC.
Griffin: And compete against everyone, quite frankly. But yes, the SEC was always in the crosshairs, but the goal was to win championships. Honest conversations did take place in our office and in our conference rooms about how unfair and unjust it felt specifically for Oregon State and Washington State, and frankly, at that moment in time, the entire industry could have done better and did not. And so it’s interesting that I’m here four and a half years later and looking forward to what we’re going to build here or rebuild here with the Pac-12 and Oregon State Athletics.
Miller: What do you think this newly retooled Pac-12 – I guess we’re still calling it the Pac-12, you don’t necessarily have control over that – but what do you think it’s going to mean specifically for Oregon State?
Griffin: Well, it gives us an opportunity to be in a conference, and if you talk to our coaches and our student athletes, it’s really important to be in a conference because when you win that conference, if we were to win the conference in say baseball or cross country or track and field – those are two of our women’s sports – or volleyball or football, you have access to the NCAA postseason, the national championship. And so being in a conference matters a lot in that regard.
And it makes it easier for us to schedule. It makes it easier, easier for us to manage our finances because we’re not buying games or traveling all across the country to play in different parts of the United States. So it gives us some certainty, but most importantly it gives us an opportunity to build a relationship with, in this case, eight other schools, including Gonzaga, who’s our basketball member, or a member for a lot of other sports, but they’re renowned for men’s basketball. So we get to build relationships not only in athletics but also across our academy. Our CFO and our general counsel, they’re working and others are working with their colleagues across the entire conference. So it gives us a community really and then it gives us some certainty.
Miller: The money in collegiate athletics is really tied to men’s football and basketball, in that order, but I’m glad that you mentioned some of the other teams. OSU has something like 15 other teams between women and men. How do you make sure, as an athletic director, that those other student athletes get the attention and the resources that they deserve in a country in which the vast majority of attention and resources go to only two sports?
Griffin: Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s something that I think all of us wrestle with from a financial standpoint, but what we don’t wrestle with, and I certainly don’t wrestle with is that every single one of our student athletes is important to all of them. We have nearly 500 student athletes and, as you mentioned, are competing in 16 different sports. And our job, our mission, what I get up every day to do is to make sure that the dreams of our student athletes come true, whether they want to become a doctor or an engineer or a pharmacist or a professional football player.
Our job is to ensure that we have the right adults and administrators and processes in place so that they can reach their full potential and their dreams come true. They just so happen to be athletes here at Oregon State, and that’s how most of them are paying for their ability to go to school, through scholarships. So that’s our focus, is making sure that they achieve their goals and their dreams. On a financial standpoint, however, we want to make sure that we’re supporting each of those programs so that the coaches have the resources they need, everything from nutrition to sports psychology, to mental health, to the equipment room and the training room, so those athletes are first and foremost safe, and secondly they’re supported, and then they can compete to win.
So we have to have great facilities and great equipment and great tools, everything from our science and data so that our student athletes are in position to win. Everyone really does understand, however, that football drives the business of college athletics because of the television media rights and because of ticket sales for large stadiums. That’s what drives the business and it’s really important. I’m proud to say that we do a nice job in that area and I’m really proud of all the other coaches that we have, not only here at Oregon State, but other places that I’ve been, who recognize the economic situation that we’re in. And they do the best that they can do with the resources that they have, but they’re focused on, first and foremost, on serving those student athletes.
Miller: You’ve had a really varied career in athletics. You worked for the Cleveland Browns and the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL, the Major League Soccer team DC United, before going back to Oregon State, your alma mater where you played football. What was the transition from professional to collegiate athletics like for you professionally?
Griffin: It’s a great question. So I started my career actually working at our state high school association in Washington, the WIAA. So I started kind of at the ground level in high school sports because that really mattered to me, is supporting young people, and then right into the NFL and spent 12 years in the NFL in the executive roles with the Seattle Seahawks and Cleveland Browns. Then off to an agency where I spent five years and became the president of a large agency in Cleveland. And then I had this itch to get back into the sports, on the team side, quick stop at DC United and then Ohio State, where I’ve served as an executive there as well.
Professional sports compared to college sports, there’s a lot that I’m taking, that I can take away from that experience in the professional ranks relative to how we’re operating today in college athletics, which is understanding the ability to commercialize what you do, the business that you have, but the difference is making sure you get back and stay true to that mission of our student-athlete experience and the work we do on campus and educating our young people. There’s nothing that makes me more happy and proud, quite frankly, than watching our student athletes perform in the academic arena or in the community, and then watching them graduate and then coming back to a university that meant so much to them.
I was fortunate at Ohio State to be there for four years in a leadership role. And so I came in with a class and a number of students who were freshmen, and then I got to watch them graduate, and it was so fun in May to watch all those young people who I’ve watched come in from high school to graduate as Buckeyes, and I look forward to doing that here at Oregon State. It’s the thing that I talked to our coaches about the most and our donors and the rest of the community is while we have the opportunity to perform on the field, the pitch, the court or the track, or the diamond in baseball and softball’s cases, the most important day is the day that those young people will graduate.
Miller: Well, what do you see as the points of tension between those two sides you were talking about, because as you were saying, especially now, maybe more so than 30 years ago, I mean, and even just in the last couple of years with name image likeness deals, and just the increase in money in general in collegiate sports, what do you see as the points of tension between the business side and the student/academic side?
Griffin: Dave, I love this question. The thing that we have most in terms of tension in the system at the moment is I don’t think we’re teaching our student athletes the right value sets, right? We’re not exposing them to the right way to think and the right value set. What I mean by that is it’s important to us, it’s important to me, and what we’re doing here at Oregon State is that we sign covenants, not contracts, with our student athletes. What I mean by that is when I look a parent in the eye or our coaches look a parent in the eye and say, “Hey, I’m going to take care of this young person. You’re giving us your most precious resource to come here to Oregon State.” We have to be committed to that young person for the four or five years that they’re going to be here, and we want that same commitment from that young person and their family.
Where we have tension now is a lot of student athletes are – or student athletes, I shouldn’t say a lot – are jumping from school to school through the transfer portal. And that creates a ton of, number one, financial tension, but I think I think it also creates tension around connecting to your school, wherever your school is and building that community and that network. And I sound like an old man right now, but doing it for the right reasons, for the colors you’re wearing, as opposed to the check you’re receiving, that’s hard, right? That would be hard for you and I as adults, right? If someone comes to us and is willing to double your financial situation.
So folks have to make the right decision, but that’s something that we wrestle with, and it comes down to relationships, and it comes down to the type of people we bring into Oregon State athletics, that being our student athletes, the type of coaches and the type of adults that we have from an administrative standpoint working.
Miller: You’d have to have some pretty important feeling relationships for someone to say, you know what, if I can double the money I think I’m going to get, I will stay where I am.
Griffin: Yeah, we’re fortunate that I know that opportunity has happened here at Oregon State and the students stay here, so the environments that we create are incredibly important. And I’ll share something. I hope this is not, this is maybe a little too personal, but my wife and I, we have three kids and our daughter’s an all-American gymnast at the University of Missouri and the SEC, and they’re an incredible team, and she’s been offered a number of times to leave and she will not. And she won’t because of this incredible relationship she has with her coach and her teammates and her university.
And I look to that as really a model. We have the exact same thing happening here at Oregon State, but that’s the type of relationship that we have to build. It can’t be a contract. It can’t be you’re coming here because of the money. You have to be able to want to come here to Oregon State because you want to be a part of this incredible team, and that starts with our coaches, Dave, like JaMarcus Shephard and Justin Joyner and Tanya and Mitch and Chris, all these folks are incredible teachers and coaches and they care deeply about this place and the student athletes. So I hope broadly as an industry, we get back to this because that’s what makes college sports, and that’s what makes the university experience unique.
Miller: I want to go back to football, and some news this week. A new study has gotten a lot of attention, found that at least a quarter of former professional football players who died between 2016 and 2021 had the degenerative brain disease CTE, and the research pointed out that this scarily high percentage, one in four, is not the ceiling, it’s the floor, that the actual number could be significantly higher than that. What went through your mind when you saw this study?
Griffin: Yeah, it’s interesting having worked in the NFL for a long time and then being part of the group that put together the Zackery Lystedt Law in 2009 that passed in the state of Washington, that was a return-to-play law in the state of Washington that then was passed in all 50 states, 49 other states.
Miller: A post-concussion protocol?
Griffin: Yeah, yeah, for youth in high school sports. And so I got an intimate look at what that whole process was about at the youth in high school level, right? It’s something that we all take incredibly seriously. I can’t speak to what the research shared from the NFL data that you just shared, but I can just tell you that across the industry, everyone’s point of view and the way that we manage head injuries, quite frankly, all student athletes or athlete health has changed.
It’s wildly improved in a very short period of time. So my message here would just be that we’ve got to continue to work with our doctors and scientists and others to improve what we do for our student athletes, in my case, our student athletes here at Oregon State, but this is always top of mind. The health and safety of our student athletes is, first and foremost, the thing that is that we have to keep our eye on.
Miller: What do you say to parents who see these kinds of studies and say I do not want my kid playing football in junior high school or ever after that?
Griffin: Yeah, I think this is the easiest question you’ve asked me so far, and that’s because I’ve been able to coach at the high school and youth level and all around. You’ve got to have a real conversation with your coach. And the coach needs to be educated on what this means. And there have been times, I mean, I would tell parents all the time, look, if there’s even a question that a young person has some kind of head injury, whether they have it or not, they’re not playing and they’re not coming back, even to practice, until they have been cleared by a doctor. It’s something you don’t play around with.
So educating your coaches, having that relationship with your parents, and then being absolutely wed to the health and safety of young people at the youth, high school, junior high school level is critically important. But it comes down to the education of our coaches. USA Football and others do a great job in this area. And so if I’m a parent, I would suggest you have a real strong and hard conversation with the coach to understand their point of view. And if that doesn’t align with what you want, then move on.
Miller: Kevin Griffin, thanks very much.
Griffin: Absolutely.
Miller: Kevin Griffin is vice president and director of athletics at Oregon State University.
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