North Carolina athletics director Bubba Cunningham on Monday mostly declined to comment about scathing complaints university trustees directed toward him and his department earlier in the day, amid a time of heightened economic anxiety throughout college athletics and the ACC. Cunningham, though, said he’d be prepared for a meeting with them later this week.
During a special meeting of the UNC Board of Trustees on Monday the board approved an internal university audit of the UNC athletics department and criticized Cunningham for delays in providing financial information. One spoke of “significant frustration that we have not been able to get the information that we need from the athletics department.”
Another, Jennifer Halsey Evans, said the department faced a $17 million deficit in its current-year projections, and a cumulative deficit of $100 million in the coming years, “with no plan to address that, to mitigate that.”
“So I don’t want anyone to think we’re talking in code,” she said. “There are real issues here, a real concern that one of our most valuable assets, and something that really generates revenue, is not being managed properly.”
Cunningham, who has been the UNC athletics director since 2011, was traveling to Florida for the ACC’s annual spring meetings when the trustees met Monday morning. The purpose of the meeting was to work toward approving an overall university budget of approximately $4 billion.
The athletics department is a small percentage of that, and most of its budget comes from private funding and revenue generated by UNC’s teams or from distributions from the ACC. Cunningham did not address the board’s criticism in depth when approached Monday evening.
“I really don’t have any reaction,” he said. “I haven’t talked to anybody. You know I’ve been here the whole time.”
The ACC’s spring meetings end Wednesday and he said he’d meet with the trustees Thursday.
“I’ll prepare for Thursday,” he said.
Throughout Cunningham’s tenure, UNC’s athletics department has not lacked for financial resources — at least not publicly, or in a way that would suggest it has struggled more than its peers. UNC in the past decade has built new facilities for its track and field, soccer, field hockey and lacrosse programs. It opened a $40 million indoor football practice facility in 2018.
The university sponsors 28 varsity teams, a broad-based program that is a point of pride for Cunningham and other university administrators. UNC did not cut any of those teams during the pandemic — a point Ralph Meekins, another trustee, raised in defense of Cunningham.
“While other schools were dropping programs,” UNC did not, said Meekins, who as a UNC student was a manager for the Tar Heels’ national championship basketball team in 1982. Meekins was the only trustee during the meeting Monday who defended Cunningham after other trustees criticized him over his department’s finances and his ability to produce data they’d requested.
“I don’t think people understand the issue,” John Preyer, the chairman of the trustees, said about not having the desired information about athletics revenue, and projections. “I don’t think they understand the level of bad data that has been provided.”
Evans criticized Cunningham for not being available for a trustees meeting in March, when Cunningham was traveling during the NCAA Tournament. Cunningham is the chair of the 2025 NCAA Tournament Selection Committee and, as vice chair, his attendance during the tournament was mandatory. Meekins said Cunningham had been available, anyway, to meet virtually.
“I don’t appreciate the comments and the inferences that the athletic director has not been forthcoming and available,” said Meekins, who voted against the board’s proposal to have the athletic department audited. The rest of the board approved that measure, though, and will direct Dean Weber, UNC’s Chief Audit Officer, to review the athletics department.
The trustees’ criticism of Cunningham and his department comes at a particularly fraught time throughout college athletics, and the ACC. The conference is involved in five lawsuits and two member schools, Florida State and Clemson, have sued the league over its Grant of Rights in an attempt to find an exit from the league.
The ACC continues to set revenue records, but continues to fall further and further behind the Big Ten and SEC, in a financial sense. Those two conferences, bolstered by massive television rights deals, are projected in the coming years to pay out between $20 and $40 million more to their members than the ACC will distribute to theirs.
The growing financial disparity, and the pressure it has created for schools aiming to compete at the highest level of college football, prompted Florida State and Clemson to file their lawsuits. Both schools have dominated the ACC in football in recent years, and FSU has won 16 league championships in its 32 seasons in the conference. UNC’s last ACC football title, meanwhile, came in 1980.
The school has spent tens of millions over the past decade in football facility upgrades, and transformed the locker rooms and other parts of the Kenan Football Center upon Mack Brown’s return as head coach in 2018. The trustees during their meeting Monday repeatedly referenced a projected UNC athletics department budget of $125 million in the coming year.
Later, one trustee corrected the projection: The right number was actually $134.97 million, he said.
It was unclear how that correction affected the projected deficits the trustees alleged.
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