LOS ANGELES — Shortly over two weeks after she orchestrated Washington’s move to the Big Ten, Jennifer Cohen was announced on Monday as USC’s choice to be its newest athletic director – the program that helped originally force Washington’s hand in the first place.
And Cohen admitted, while taking questions from reporters Monday, that she was originally “disappointed” at the Washington helm when news broke that the Trojans were leaving. But such is the current landscape of college sports, she continued. And suddenly at the beginning of August, when negotiations on a new Pac-12 media deal fell flat, she helped pull off what she called a “four-day transition” between conferences.
“Having spent a lot of time studying the Big Ten in my previous role and understanding the dynamics of the Big Ten – benchmarking the Big Ten from a salary standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a facilities standpoint – I have a lot of that understanding already in preparation for where I was before,” Cohen said Monday.
It’s a firsthand knowledge she plans to bring to USC, in perhaps the biggest long-term project on Cohen’s plate the minute she sits down in Heritage Hall for her first day Tuesday: take up the mantle to lead the Trojans’ move into a new conference.
“I was talking to Ana Mari (Cauce) today, saying, ‘Good athletic directors in every school are going to be critical to the success’ … we’re all trying to do something new that hasn’t been done,” USC president Carol Folt said of a Monday conversation with Washington president Cauce, referring to the Big Ten move.
Things, however, have worked a little unconventionally down at USC since former A.D. Mike Bohn, who was widely credited as a major player in the Big Ten move, stepped down unexpectedly in May following a departmental investigation. Since, Denise Kwok – formerly holding a mouthful of a title as USC’s executive senior associate athletic director for student-athlete development – has been the interim, but has been supported in Big Ten planning by a multi-pronged approach.
There’s been an external team, courtesy of Huron Consulting: former Penn State A.D. Sandy Barbour, former Duke deputy A.D. Mitch Moser and former Big 12 commissioner Kevin Weinberg. There’s been an internal team: take Ed Stewart, a USC administrator in charge of football operations, who’s been working with Weinberg on transitioning plans for the Fox-sponsored Big Ten Network, or Sam Adams, USC’s deputy chief of staff who Barbour called the process’ “air traffic controller.”
And thus, a laundry list of departments and items for Cohen to oversee. Here’s a Big Ten moving checklist, supplanted with information from Barbour and Stewart on the interim team’s work, for USC’s newest athletic director to tackle in the next year:
Item no. 1: Scheduling
By June, the Trojans had their 2024 and 2025 schedule of opponents set for football, cycling through a list of nine opponents out of a then-16 Big Ten schools. Some were consistent between years, like Penn State and UCLA. Some were different.
Then Oregon and Washington joined the Big Ten. Back, sort of, to the drawing board.
“Our view is going to be that UCLA is our protect, our annual opponent,” Barbour said, “and so the other … opponents, we’ll rotate through.”
Beyond football, schedules have yet to be structured for any of the university’s other sports, Barbour said.
Item no. 2: Benchmarking
Ah, yes, that concept Cohen mentioned Monday. Benchmarking – defined in this case by Barbour and Stewart as collecting data to evaluate where USC stands relative to its Big Ten peers – has been the most tangible initiative of conference realignment plans.
Some areas that USC is working to evaluate itself against other Big Ten schools, Barbour and Stewart said: total budget, sport-by-sport budget, sports sponsorship, number of personnel, number of sports psychologists, number of athletic trainers and academic counselors.
“So we understand – where we are, who we’re competing against, what kind of resources they have, and where they’re putting it,” Barbour said.
A major part of this is budgeting, as USC hasn’t set travel budgets yet for coming years in the midst of such benchmarking, Stewart said.
Item no. 3: Facility upgrades
From her years in development and fundraising at Washington, Cohen has plenty of experience with beefing up campus facilities – including raising more than $50 million for the renovation of Washington’s Husky Stadium.
She’ll now be tasked with overseeing major planned initiatives at USC: breaking ground on Rawlinson Stadium, a future home for the Trojans’ women’s soccer and lacrosse teams, and a new football performance center that promises to be another selling point for recruits amid the Big Ten transition.
“They’re huge,” Barbour said of the planned facilities. “They’re all building blocks to USC being more positioned to compete – not only in the Big Ten, but nationally.”
Item no. 4: Student-athlete wellness
From a national standpoint, the increased exposure for student-athletes across different time zones is a “huge lift” to the USC brand, Barbour said.
It also, however, could be a huge weight on the minds and bodies of student-athletes, given the travel requirements necessary for multi-game-per-week sports like baseball. From that lens, Stewart said, Dr. Robin Scholefield – USC’s director of culture, wellbeing and clinical and sport psychological services – has been leading a team analyzing the effects of such increased travel on athletes’ mental health.
The department has also spent time talking to sleep experts, Stewart said, to ensure coaches “have all the tools in their toolbox” in relation to managing student-athlete stress.
“We believe we’ve led the country as it relates to that, going into this transition,” Barbour said.