After Sandy Barbour signed a contract extension in February 2019 to remain as Penn State’s athletic director though Aug. 31, 2023, she said that Penn State would be her “last stop” and that “this will be it.”
It hasn’t turned out that way. She is now an AD at her fourth university.
Barbour, 65, is the new interim athletic director at Utah State, the university announced on Friday. She’ll be the third athletic director in three years at Utah State after Aggies AD Diana Sabau left to be the senior deputy athletic director at the University of Maryland.
Barbour’s first day on the job at the university based in Logan, Utah, is Monday. There will be a lot on her plate:
In her two years at USU, Sabau guided Utah State’s move from the Mountain West Conference to the Pac-12, beginning in 2026. (Barbour was AD at Cal for 10 years when it was a member of the Pac-12.) Sabau hired men’s basketball coach Jerrod Calhoun, as well as football coach Bronco Mendenhall, who replaced the fired Blake Anderson, who is suing USU for $15 million in a wrongful termination suit. Sabau was previously the Big Ten Conference’s deputy commissioner and, prior to that, was senior deputy AD at Ohio State, where she oversaw football and hockey.
Barbour was AD at Penn State (2014-2022), Cal (2004-14) and Tulane (1996-99), and was a high-ranking deputy athletic director at Notre Dame (2000-2004).
Barbour’s departure from Penn State back in spring 2022 was swift and unexpected. Just as new Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi was slated to start in May 2022, Barbour announced her retirement 17 months early, on March 16, 2022. Just six weeks later, Pat Kraft was named Penn State’s new vice president of intercollegiate athletics.
At Penn State, Barbour guided Penn State to national championships in women’s volleyball, coached by Russ Rose; women’s soccer (Erica Dambach) and wrestling (Cael Sanderson). She hired Katie Schumacher-Cawley to succeed Rose as head coach in January 2022. Last season, Schumacher-Cawley led the Penn State women’s volleyball program to its eighth national championship. She was honored last week with the Jimmy V Perseverance Award at the ESPYs after her battle with cancer.
Under Barbour’s direction at Penn State, PSU signed football coach James Franklin to a 10-year contract extension in November 2021, worth over $75 million and runs through 2031. Franklin’s buyout on Jan. 1, 2026, is $1 million owed to Penn State. It would cost Penn State $40 million to buy out Franklin in 2026, with a drop of $8 million per calendar year after that.
In a podcast interview with On3’s Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman in April, Franklin praised the “working relationship and support he has with Kraft, Bendapudi and the Penn State Board of Trustees.
“I’m in a situation now where, for really the first time here at Penn State, we have the alignment that I’ve been pounding on the table for 12 years,” Franklin said. “That’s from the board to our president Neeli Bendapudi, who has been phenomenal, to our athletic director Pat Kraft, who played football in the Big Ten and understands what it takes. And you’ve seen that type of commitment with some of the things we’ve been able to do. …And we’re in a great position right now. When you talk about alignment, we have that in a way that we’ve never had that before.”
BARBOUR AND HURON
Since leaving Penn State in 2022, Barbour has worked at Huron, a consulting firm that advises universities and athletic departments. Key players in the Huron intercollegiate athletics space include Jim Delany, former Big Ten commissioner; Kevin Wieberg, former Big 12 commissioner; and Kevin White, former athletic director at Duke, Notre Dame and Tulane, the latter two where he was Barbour’s boss and mentor.
Utah State is hiring Barbour, but the school is also getting the brainpower and support of Huron. The firm will help USU’s search for a permanent athletic director. Meantime, Barbour will be working for another temporary leader at Utah State, Alan Smith, who was named the school’s interim president in February.
“Barbour, and the team at Huron, bring extensive experience and expertise in championship-level Division I athletics, including NIL, operations, finance, recruiting, facilities management and marketing,” Smith said in a news release. “They will provide a valuable national perspective on the evolving college athletics landscape and our transition into the Pac-12, while also bringing stability to our athletics leadership team.”
Utah State expects to begin a national search for a full-time athletic director in August.
Barbour and Utah State alumnus Doug Fiefia will lead a group of internal and external stakeholders of USU athletics that, according to the university, “will provide Smith with recommendations on essential and preferred job qualifications of the next USU athletic director, ways for the athletic director to meaningfully engage USU stakeholders, and critical directions for advancing the mission and national recognition of USU athletics.” The committee will complete its work by early August, after which the AD search will commence.
