Joe Echevarria, the President of the University of Miami, joined the Pat McAfee Show to discuss Canes football. A transcript of the conversation is below:
The Pat McAfee Show: Ladies and gentlemen, the president and CEO of the University of Miami, Joe Echevarria. How you doing, Mr. President?
Joe Echevarria: I am fantastic. Pat, how are you guys?
The Pat McAfee Show: Did I nail the intro? I want to make sure I get everything right because there’s so many accolades. I’m very impressed by the work you’ve done.
Joe Echevarria: Well, you did it — not as well as your 10-meter dive was, but you did pretty well.
The Pat McAfee Show: Miami is hosting the national championship on Monday and your team is in that. What does that mean for your school and your university? When you took over and decided to go in the direction you went, is this the dream scenario for the university and for Miami?
Joe Echevarria: It’s pretty magical for us, as you can imagine. One thing people don’t realize is we started this journey on December 6, 2021 — literally that’s when we picked up Mario and his family in Eugene, Oregon, and landed at Miami airport. December 7, we get invited to the College Football Playoff. So it’s exactly four years.
It’s extraordinary for the city, it’s extraordinary for the university, but as Mario likes to say, we’re here now — and the objective is to stay here. Stay here. Continue to be relevant.
It happens to be in our city. We won three of our national championships at the Orange Bowl, so we like being at home. We’re not the home team, but we are at home. The city has gone crazy. There’s nothing like this. You know this, and your guys know this — nothing galvanizes a community like sports. All the differences get put aside, all the rivalries get put aside, and everybody is singly focused on the University of Miami.
The Pat McAfee Show: It feels like when you took over you understood that if your sports teams were good, that would be good for the university as a whole. What’s the tie between having good sports and the rest of the campus?
Joe Echevarria: Yeah, that’s very accurate — with all three domains, as you know. We talked about this when you were down here.
We’re in three things: the academic side, the research side that needs to be great — and it is extraordinary. We have an academic health system that’s top 10 in the country today. It wasn’t a few years ago, but it is now. And athletics.
Athletics lifts the entire brand of the university for us. We have a storied program in football, baseball, and other sports. So it was important to be great at all three. We focus on all three.
This show is about athletics, and I love athletics. I’m just a kid from the South Bronx, so for me this is extraordinary — but it’s all three, not one or the other.
That “U” logo you have up there? That was built by athletics. That was not built by anything else. Athletics raises the brand and the consciousness about the University of Miami. It wasn’t that way when I went to school here in 1974 — nobody called us “The U.” Nobody knew who we were. In fact, they called us “Sun Tan U” back in those days.
So athletics changed the architecture of what people think about us. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment, but it’s part of three stools: a pillar of academics and research, a pillar of the health system, and a pillar of athletics. They all matter — all three.
The Pat McAfee Show: We’re in a world now of NIL, the ACC, realignment, private equity, TV contracts — the Big Ten and SEC driving a lot of the conversation. How involved are you in all of this, and how do you navigate it?
Joe Echevarria: You’re right, Pat. A big part of this is brands and viewership, because it is a business. Networks, streamers, ESPN — one of our great partners — they’re looking at viewership, and viewership drives the contracts.
I tell people all the time: in the ACC, we are playing for our next contract right now. Right now. We need to improve viewership top to bottom. We happen to be one of the top-viewed programs, but the conference as a whole needs to continue to invest in athletics so we can have success on the field.
The fact that the ACC is in the championship game matters. We had to beat some teams from the SEC and the Big Ten to even get here, and we did. That proves the conference is very competitive from top to bottom. We’re proud of that.
But the truth is, college football — and college sports in general — has not found its equilibrium in terms of market forces. It’s a little dislocated. All professional sports at some point had to find equilibrium, where you move from a control process to a partnership. The value of being in the NFL today is different than when you played. The value of being in college today is different than when you and AJ played. That’s what happens when you create alignment.
The next step is to find that equilibrium — in the ACC and across all conferences. We have to rise all boats. Until we create that market equilibrium, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Look at history. In Major League Baseball, Curt Flood started the challenge — Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally finished it in the 70s, and they got equilibrium. Oscar Robertson started it for the ABA and NBA merger. John Mackey started it for the Colts, Reggie White finished it in ’93, and that group got equilibrium. We’re still on our way. We haven’t gotten there yet because we’re still functioning as independent conferences.
Remember — we are the NCAA. We keep talking about “the NCAA,” but it’s the member schools. We haven’t won a market-based litigation since 1984, when Oklahoma and Georgia beat us trying to control TV rights. We’ve lost virtually every case since. That means we have to let go of that old model and create a partnership model like professional sports. That’s a long journey — they didn’t get there overnight, and we won’t either — but I feel good about the trajectory.
The Pat McAfee Show: So you’re going to get that done?
Joe Echevarria: You need the Broadcasting Act — that’s where major league sports get antitrust protection around revenue, so you don’t have to negotiate TV contracts as five separate conferences. You can do it collectively. That’s step one.
Step two is creating a collective bargaining partnership with the players. Today, under the House settlement, universities can pay $20 to $22 million — but the outside market has no cap. You have to bring both sides together as partners.
You can’t do this one-by-one-by-one. That creates a distorted, chaotic marketplace that isn’t fair — especially to players. There are about 4,000 kids in the transfer portal right now, but there aren’t 4,000 opportunities. That process is dislocated.
This isn’t going to be a one-year or two-year fix. But we have to recognize that we need to land in a different place than we are today — all conferences, all schools that want to compete at this level.
