Jamie Pollard, the longest-tenured AD in the Power Four, is stepping away from Iowa State on his own terms.
There are athletics directors who manage a department, and there are the rare few who build one into something that outlives them. Jamie Pollard has spent 22 years proving he belongs in the second group with the announcement that he will retire, effective June 30, 2027 (or whenever Iowa State has his successor in place).
For coaches and administrators who have watched the job change beneath their feet over the last few years, the timing tells you something. Pollard is walking away during the most turbulent stretch college athletics has ever seen, and he is doing it early enough to hand the next leader a runway rather than a fire drill.
"It is important to us that we transition now, while we are both healthy and young," Pollard said of himself and his wife, Ellen, clearly taking a tone of someone leaving on his own terms.
The body of work speaks for itself. When Pollard arrived in Ames in 2005, Cyclone athletics raised just over $9 million a year. This past year the department pulled in $53 million, the most in school history. Along the way he oversaw more than $400 million in facility construction and renovation touching every sport, including the $98 million Stark Performance Center that opened in 2021 and put academics, dining and sports nutrition under one roof for every athlete on campus.
On the field, Iowa State won 24 Big 12 team titles across eight sports on his watch, played in 11 bowl games, and captured the 2021 Fiesta Bowl. The Cyclones have been a fixture in both NCAA Tournaments and swept the Cy-Hawk Series this past year for the first time ever. The classroom numbers kept pace, with an 11th-consecutive record Graduation Success Rate and a school-record multi-year APR.
Pollard's peers noticed. NACDA named him the FBS Athletics Director of the Year in both 2019 and 2023, and he is the only person to serve as president of NACDA, the I-A Athletics Director's Association, and the College Athletics Business Manager's Association. A certified public accountant by trade, he was invited to a White House roundtable on saving college sports earlier this year, which tells you where he sits in the national conversation on the sport's future.
His fingerprints will stay in Ames long after he clears out his office. CyTown, the 40-acre entertainment district rising between Jack Trice Stadium and the Iowa State Center, was his brainchild, and it will be the first of its kind built into the heart of a college campus.
From a hiring persepective, there is no question his hire of Matt Campbell away from Toledo in 2016 is the high-water mark. Pollard managed to pull him away from the Rockets while he was one of the hottest young names in the country, and even more impressively was able to keep Campbell in Ames for about a decade despite Campbell having numerous opportunities to leave before he eventually took the Penn State job this past off season. Other notable football hires for Pollard include Gene Chizik (2006), Paul Rhoads (2009), and the most recent addition of Jimmy Rogers to lead Cyclone football this past off season.
President David Cook will launch a national search after a round of listening sessions with stakeholders. Whoever gets the job inherits one of the healthiest athletics operations in the country, which is exactly the point.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.