- Many schools are restructuring athletic departments in response to a dynamic college sports landscape.
- The restructuring comes nine days before the season opener and follows rumors of friction between Sitake and Santiago.
- Santiago, whose tenure has featured a nationally relevant basketball program, will continue to oversee 20 sports.
BYU shook up its athletic department on Thursday, splitting football off from the other 20 sports.
Head football coach Kalani Sitake will report directly to a university vice president while athletic director Brian Santiago will oversee the remaining programs.
The decision’s dramatic timing, nine days before the season’s first football game, underscored both the hurtling rate of change in college sports and rumors about friction between Sitake and Santiago.
“BYU Athletics shares a common focus on helping our student-athletes succeed not just on the field, but also in the classroom and, most importantly, in their Christian discipleship,” advancement vice president Keith Vorkink said in a statement.
Sitake now reports directly to Vorkink, who is also Santiago’s supervisor.
“Given today’s dynamic athletics landscape,” Vorkink said, “we feel it’s important to be providing more administrative support, not less. We’ve made recent hires with that in mind, and we’re also organizing in ways that we believe will support BYU’s world-class programs.”
The sudden disruption comes a month after Sitake, without naming names or making specific requests, called publicly for additional investment in the school’s flagship sport to help it get over the hump and into college football’s playoff.
“There’s so much that really can be accomplished and it’s really low-hanging-fruit stuff,” Sitake said in an ESPN The Fan radio interview on July 30.
Sitake has gone 23-4 over the past two years with back-to-back bowl victories. The Cougars completed those seasons ranked No. 11 and No. 13 in the final AP polls.
“The fact that we’re this close to making the playoffs,” he said in the interview, “it’s like, ‘Come on, let’s not make the same mistakes that we’ve made in the past. Let’s keep investing in BYU football, and it doesn’t take much.”
His comments stoked long-running rumors of disagreement between Santiago and Sitake, a BYU alum who has compiled an 84-45 record in 11 seasons as head coach.
Several schools, including Penn State, attempted to lure Sitake away from BYU last winter. The university retained him in December with what was his fourth contract extension in four years.
Santiago has worked in the athletic department for 29 years and succeeded Tom Holmoe as athletic director in May 2025. His first 15 months have been successful, as BYU football and men’s basketball drew constant national attention and four track athletes won individual national championships.
Thursday’s overhaul reflects the complexities of college sports expansion at breakneck speed and finances spiraling dizzyingly upward. Court decisions and other forces also disrupt the landscape.
A source with a deep understanding of the athletic department said the BYU athletic director job is now two orders of magnitude more complex than when Tom Holmoe became athletic director in 2005.
One source with direct knowledge of BYU’s decision said university leaders came to believe they had to be open to a potentially substantive reorganization to adapt to all the change.
BYU is far from the first school to restructure its athletic department in an attempt to keep up. Among many others:
- Stanford’s new AD is a former global CEO of Nike and PayPal with a mandate to reorganize in the image of a professional sports team.
- The University of South Florida hired a business leader as AD, changed his title to CEO and then added a chief operating officer (NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Brooks) and a chief business officer to oversee public-private partnerships, data analytics and commercial operations.
- The University of Utah brought on a commercial CEO to manage a separate corporate front office that now handles all licensing, ticket sales, branding and multimedia revenue.
Many schools are replicating the structural hierarchy of the NFL in their football programs or the NBA in their basketball programs, hiring general managers to oversee autonomous player personnel and scouting operations.
BYU now will try to put in place an organizational structure and processes to optimize success in this emerging, increasingly intense college sports paradigm.
That will be done without changing the athletic program’s mission or the “love and learning” culture Sitake has built in the football program, Vorkink said.
“It is crucial to remember that everything we do in athletics at BYU to compete in this dynamic, ever-changing landscape, will be done in a way that aligns the athletic department with the mission of the university,” he said. “That is always our overarching objective.“
BYU officials believed the need for change couldn’t wait until after the football season.
The university previously had separate athletic directors for men’s sports and women’s sports. A return to that system is unlikely, sources said. The school might consider a structure with a sports AD and a business AD, or having a single AD with a reconfigured set of roles for his or her lieutenants.
It’s unclear what role new deputy athletic director Marc Hill will take. Hill served as the football administrator in Kentucky’s athletic department from 2016 to 2023, then added basketball to his portfolio. BYU hired him on Aug. 10.
Santiago said Hill would be given various administrative and operational roles. Vorkink could use Hill or another deputy or assistant athletic director to help him manage football through this season while administrators determine a new structure.
This story will be updated.
