A few months ago, 68 college basketball teams from across the nation were selected for the NCAA Tournament to play for a national title. That's about 340 Division I (D-I) student-athletes competing on national television for a month. None of those athletes are enrolled at Emory University, and I assume very few have made the trek to the third floor of the Woodruff Physical Education Center, where I sat across from Emory's athletic director Tim Downes.
"There are maybe 450,000 student-athletes in the NCAA," Downes says when I bring up the tourney. "And what draws the most attention–men's basketball and football-- is about 1,000 athletes."
Downes is the face of the remaining 449,000. He's never overseen a March Madness run, but he's no stranger to athletic success-- he was recently named the Under Armour Division III (D-III) Athletic Director of the Year after overseeing an outstanding 2013-14 season that saw the Eagles capture six conference championships and a pair of national titles. His resume reads like a Who's Who of the U.S. News and World Report Top 20-ranked schools, beginning as a graduate assistant at Dartmouth before moving on to larger roles at Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech and finally Emory.
Fittingly enough, he comes off as more of a professor than a coach. His office-- a small room not much bigger than a college dorm room-- is comprised of a pair of perfectly aligned desks neatly lined with papers. The only indication of anything related to athletics is the shelves behind us, stocked full of trophies from men's basketball to golf. There isn't an empty spot on them. I am overcome with the urge to shuffle the pages of my notebook or knock over a chair to make the place seem less flawless.
Fit and well into his 40s, Downes' athlete days are behind him, but he still possesses a quiet authority. He speaks softly and pleasantly and looks at me through half-rimmed glasses. Our conversation is often interrupted by his greeting his coworkers, punctuating each sentence with a "Good afternoon, Joyce" or "How's it going, John?"
There's another word he keeps bringing up-- visibility. Visibility in the athletic offices. Visibility in the P.E. Center. Visibility around campus. With huge glass walls overlooking the bottom floor of the gym on each side, the offices may very well have been designed around the concept of visibility.
"People always come up the stairs and see me," Downes says with a grin, gesturing at the windows. "They don't have a choice."
It's a stark deviation from the Division I archetype of the "man behind the curtain" athletic director. Downes lists exercising at the students' gym among his daily routines and makes a point to never schedule meetings in his office.
We delve so far into his life outside the office-- his wife and three kids are popular topics-- that it's at least 10 minutes before we discuss the budding powerhouse that he oversees.
"This is such an easy sell," he tells me. "It's not hard for me to talk about what's going on here and have people really believe that this is one of the best programs in the country."
He's not exaggerating. Operating out of the public eye in D-III, Emory has won an astounding 16 national championships in just 30 years. The women's swimming and diving team is the crown jewel of the bunch, with four titles in the past four seasons and 13 consecutive top-four national finishes. In the Director's Cup standings, which measure across-the-board athletic success for each NCAA division, Downes and the Eagles finished in second last season-- all while operating under the academic restrictions that come with being the 20th-ranked university in the U.S. If this program were on a D-I level, it would most closely resemble a certain West Coast academic powerhouse.
"Stanford," Downes says, nodding and finishing my thought for me. "We'd be Stanford."
But even Stanford, the perennial victor in the D-I Director's Cup, doesn't face the same challenges as Emory. Stanford gives out athletic scholarships. Stanford's athletic department generates enough revenue-- regularly over $80 million-- to finance itself.
Taken out of context and dropped into a D-I world where athletic and academic departments operate on different standards, Downes' ideas sound archaic and idealistic. But he's making them a reality at Emory. He attends regular Monday morning meetings on campus life and refers to his fellow administrators as superiors-- President James Wagner is "Dr. Wagner"; Dean of Campus Life Ajay Nair is "Dean Nair."
"I think that higher education and the NCAA need places like Emory," he says. "The athletic piece can be a great complement and enhancer of the academic part of it."
As for the 68 teams in the NCAA tourney? "That's entertainment," he says with a smile. "This is education."
- By Ryan Smith
