CEO may be just the ticket.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

If college athletics is more about profit and loss than X's and and O's, Pat Kilkenny might soon find himself in familiar surroundings.

But just how easy is it to take the skills that make someone a success in the private-sector business world and create success in the world of public-sector collegiate sports? That's the question that Kilkenny's moves over the coming months will start to answer.

Kilkenny, 54, was named Wednesday as the surprise choice to become the University of Oregon's next athletic director. A self-made insurance mogul, he built a small company into a nationwide operation writing almost $1 billion in premiums a year.

He sold the company last summer and, with a nine-figure payout in the bank, agreed to take the UO job pro bono. Kilkenny attended the UO in the 1970s but did not graduate, though he still bleeds Duck green and yellow.

Now he'll have to show that his passion for Duck athletics and his business smarts give him what it takes to run an operation that demands both financial and athletic success, as well as a statesmanlike skill at building bridges with faculty, donors and fans.

To those in the sports management world, it's not an unimaginable leap. It's no more unusual than the CEO of a cereal company taking a job as, say, the head of an investment firm, something that would hardly raise an eyebrow in the corporate world.

"If you know how to run a business, you should be able to learn the nuances of the new one as long as you surround yourself with the right people and have the resources," said Andy Fellingham of Inter-Collegiate Athletics Consulting in New York. "If he's a good manager, he should be a good manager in the athletic department."

That's a common view among those who watch college sports from the outside or from a business perspective. For them, athletics is a business - at most Division I schools, a big business - and hiring a businessman as athletics director is no more unusual than putting on a suit in the morning.

And the skill sets aren't that different: A corporate CEO has to massage the egos of big investors, motivate employees and build consensus among competing personalities and departments, in addition to putting black ink on the bottom line. An athletic director deals with big donors, motivates staff and coaches, and builds consensus not only among competing programs but with the academic community, and at the UO is expected to put black ink on the bottom line.

"Let's face it, it's a multi-million dollar business," said Lynn Lashbrook, a former athletic director and now president of Portland-based Sports Management Worldwide. "And often in education we don't bring that acumen for business."

Lashbrook and others say that more athletic departments are seeking that expertise. At the news conference announcing Kilkenny's selection, UO President Dave Frohnmayer said the university looked for precedents and found that both the University of Michigan and Purdue University had made similar choices. The University of Wisconsin is another institution that tapped its booster base for an athletic director.

Business sense is just one of the skills a pick such as Kilkenny brings to the table. In an arena ever more dependent on outside revenue, he also will be judged on his success at building the donor base and landing the big gifts, starting with the ones needed for a new basketball arena.

In this, Kilkenny starts out with an advantage: He's rich. And if wealth attracts wealth, he might be the person the UO needs to preserve its status as one of the few big schools with a self-funded athletic department.

"One of the problems you see with fundraisers at universities is they bring in people who have never had money, so they don't know how to talk to people who have money," Fellingham said. "And people who have money talk different than people who don't have money. This guy has money; he can talk to people who have money."

But that's not the only language Kilkenny will have to speak. He will be closely watched by a large and often vocal faculty, a constituency that has no clear parallel in the business world.

And Kilkenny arrives at a time when athletics and its relationship to academics - a sensitive subject in the best of times - is going through one of its periodic discussions at the UO. Even before Kilkenny arrived, professors were upset over a football game being scheduled for the weekend before finals next year, concerned at the amount of money being raised for athletics and worried that the "student" in "student-athlete" is being marginalized.

It is too early to judge how faculty will receive the new athletic director, but it seems he at least got off on the right foot. On Wednesday he woke up early to attend a hastily organized breakfast with key faculty members before his appointment was announced, stopped in later at a UO Senate meeting for an introduction, and that evening attended a reception for professors who recently received a new academic honor.

"He certainly walks the walk," said English professor Suzanne Clark, a member of the athletic director search committee. "If that represents the kind of commitment he has to the university as a whole, then it's a good start. I think we're all holding our breath and feeling optimistic."

That kind of attention to his new colleagues across the river could go a long way, but Kilkenny will have to do more than socialize to win a passing grade from faculty. Problems he'll have to deal with straight away include the scheduling issue and academic support for student athletes.

But he also faces a new issue: a growing sentiment among professors that seemingly cash-rich athletic programs, long fed from the general fund before becoming self-supporting a few years ago, ought to be sending something back across the river.

Faculty members hope "that there would be a way some of the resources the athletic department brings in can be shared with the academic side," Honors College professor David Frank said. "I understand they are self-sufficient, but more resources might be forthcoming in this direction."

How Kilkenny handles that while keeping fans, donors, athletes and coaches happy, his teams winning and the cash flow positive will show how well the worlds of business and college sports mesh.