Tom McMillen, the former University of Maryland basketball legend and representative, may move down at the end of the summer from his position as CEO of LEAD1 Association, the FBS athletic director business organization announced Thursday.
McMillen, 71, has led LEAD1 for nine times, during which time the business of college sports has been shaken to its base on account of legal and legislative deathblows to the NCAA’s design.
That ruckus has complicated the function of LEAD1, which, due to McMillen taking over in soon 2015, had are- charted its objective. The organization’s board chair at the time, presently- past Notre Dame sport director Jack Swarbrick, had sought to change what had mostly been an association focused on professional development, to one seeking to build sport directors ‘ social influence by finding consensus.

In a phone interview on Thursday, McMillen stated,” The part we have played is to convene to discuss these issues.”
However, due to the restricting results of NCAA prosecution and the growing forces of economic populism, cooperation has been harder to come by in new times—even among the creation.
” It has become a lot more siloed”, McMillen said. The atmosphere is not as enticing as it was when I first started. … Athletic directors rarely come together, and I do n’t think that is good for the industry”.
McMillen also attributed the “fractious nature of the industry” to Congressional inaction.
Though not a registered lobbyist, McMillen has been a frequent fixture in the halls of Congress, having relocated LEAD1 to the Washington, D. C., area upon assuming the CEO job. Unofficially, McMillen has also served as one of the go- to voices for the powers that be in intercollegiate athletics, a role he took on more and more during the reign of the NCAA’s much- maligned and media- averse past president, Mark Emmert.
McMillen claims that he has had a much more intimate relationship with Charlie Baker, the current president of the NCAA and another former politician who was also born in the same hospital in New York, and that he has had frequent conversations with him.
McMillen’s announced departure comes amid a mass exodus in the C- suites of college sports, including retirements among some of McMillen’s key AD acolytes: Duke’s Kevin M. White in 2021, Penn State’s Sandy Barbour in 2022, Iowa’s Gary Barta in 2023, Swarbrick this past March, and Ohio State’s Gene Smith this coming July.
McMillen, however, insists he is not retiring, instead describing his LEAD1 leave- taking as an act of” switching mountains”. Even though it’s not necessarily his full-time job, he claims he intends to continue to be involved in the debate over the future of college sports.
McMillen readily acknowledges his “disappointments” with many of the recent developments, particularly the outcome of the antitrust lawsuits filed by classes of current and former college athletes against the NCAA. LEAD1 has been bedeviled by these lawsuits, just as the business has been turned on its head.

” In the beginning, it was n’t so legalistically focused”, McMillen said. ” We were focused on academic misconduct, a lot of internal NCAA issues, regional scheduling—a lot of things dealing with the enterprise. We now devote a lot of our time to monitoring, observing, and monitoring these legal issues.
McMillen claims that despite numerous bills being proposed and hearings held, he has also been disappointed by Congress ‘ lack of college sports solutions.
” If you go back to the earliest NIL bills, they were simple, in retrospect”, McMillen said. ” And all of a sudden, the issues morphed, and they got more complicated. It has been a moving target”.
McMillen acknowledged that he does n’t “have a clue where it is going to go” unless a settlement is reached in the House v. NCAA lawsuit and “dust clears the air” when asked about potential future congressional intervention.
McMillen served in the House of Representatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s after a decade-long NBA career that culminated with the Washington Bullets. He was recognized as a critic of college sports who wanted to change the status quo there. McMillen was the author of a 1990 law that required universities to disclose their athletes ‘ graduation rates in opposition to the NCAA.
The Collegiate Athletics Reform Act, which was sponsored by McMillen in 1991, proposed granting the NCAA a temporary antitrust exemption subject to a number of changes. Incentivizing Title IX compliance and athlete academic performance, the NCAA provided guaranteed five-year scholarships for athletes, greater due process in NCAA infraction cases, and a distribution of television revenue.
The legislation, which McMillen then acknowledged “may be a little bit ahead of its time”, ultimately did n’t go anywhere. In a book he co-authored, Out of Bounds: How the American Sport Establishment is Being Driven by Greed and Hypocrisy, McMillen continued to press his reform recommendations the following year.
Among other things, the book criticized the NCAA for its championing of” shamatuerism”.
Given this history, McMillen’s decision to join LEAD1, then called the 1A Athletic Directors ‘ Association, struck some other college sports reformers—particularly those pushing for athlete economic opportunities—as selling out the cause for a high- paying job. McMillen earned$ 500, 000 in 2022, according to LEAD1’s tax filings. ( The group is primarily funded through membership, which accounted for$ 1.2 million of its$ 1.7 million in 2022 revenue. )
McMillen, however, insists his perspective on college sports has remained consistent over the years.
” Listen, I am all for kids making money— I was a pioneer in calling for it—but we have allowed for some of the excess to get out of control”, McMillen said.
In June 2022, McMillen wrote an op- ed for Sportico arguing that athletic departments—and, thus, athletic directors —should be in charge of overseeing athlete NIL activities. That idea is quickly forming thanks to new state-based laws and a lawsuit brought against the NCAA by several state attorneys general.
However, McMillen’s priorities are ultimately more focused on redistributing the wealth between sports and schools rather than distributing it.
” If I were playing God, I would take this enormous sum of money on the table and find ways to redirect it to HBCUs,” McMillen said. ” I would have gone much further and reiterated the notion that this ( college sports ) is one of the greatest professional development machines.”
He added:” The big vision of college sports is that we do n’t have a half- a- million but a million college athletes. We create more opportunities, do more for underprivileged schools. That’s where I believe the system should go, and I do n’t believe it’s out of the question.
If McMillen so chooses, he will have at least two additional opportunities to make this case before a sizable number of FBS athletic directors, including those who will attend the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics convention in Las Vegas and the LEAD1 fall member meeting in Washington.
His official last day will be Sept. 30.