The New Athletic Department Job

Working through some technology contracts the past couple of weeks, it's becoming clear that the new job for athletic departments may be a CIO -- chief information officer -- just like some universities and almost every large company in the country. I base that on who incredibly stupid some companies think college athletic departments are, and the fact that they aren't too far from accurate.

We had a presentation by one company in which the rep hit Cntrl-F in the browser to search for a term within a web page. Two coaches in the presentation went, ooh, ah, hey we need this program. I've always wanted to be able to search like that.

Oh. My. God. It's called Firefox. And Internet Explorer. The coaches really thought it was a feature of the service being pitched.

It seems a lot of these companies are the one-eyed man in the land of the blind -- athletic types with just enough computer savvy to seem uber-geek and sell those services to the lazy or ignorant. Key word there often is lazy -- can you write this for me, can you post this for me, can you fix my bookmarks.

Then again, maybe the real money is in consulting and training for athletic departments. Hmm.