Athletic greatness comes in all shapes and all sizes.

It doesn't come naturally, but is achieved from hard work, diligence and adversity along the journey.

There's opportunity and there's always struggle.

There is triumph and there is defeat, and there is always a story behind the glory.

Often forgotten in the world of sports, are the movers and shakers who work behind the scenes for Tom Burnett, a mentor he met as a college student at Louisiana Tech, would lay the groundwork for a decades long career in sports administration.

His leadership has not only left an impact across the state of Louisiana, but also the entire nation.

Tom Burnett, your resumé covers a lot of territory.

But I want to go back to your college days at Louisiana Tech.

Would it be fair to say that there were times, maybe a few semesters, where you were meandering and didn't exactly know where you wanted life to take you?

Meandering is a very kind word land.

I appreciate you phrasing it that way.

I would say that's very accurate.

I, I was probably a student, not really sure what, he wanted to do.

What he wanted to study.

I'd been in the school of business for a couple of years.

Didn't think that was for me.

Always had had an interest in sports, but also had kind of a side interest in journalism.

My father was a voracious reader of the daily newspaper.

Wherever he was, from back to front, front to back.

And, I kind of grew up around the newspaper, and sports was obviously, something that I, you know, I didn't know there was a way to be connected as such.

And as a meandering student at Louisiana Tech, I, you know, got an invite or wandered into the sports information office at the athletic department, that was led by Keith Prince, the sports information director, also in the Hall of Fame as well.

And Keith kind of took me under his wing.

And not only did the light bulb go off for me, it really kind of exploded.

I realized there was an opportunity to be around sports and perhaps make that a vocation in the future.

my initial goal was to simply replace Keith Prince as the Louisiana Tech side.

That's all I ever wanted to do.

And you know it out.

Well, I'll just live in Ruston, and start my family, and that'd be a wonderful thing.

But the opportunity to go to the conference office really opened up some eyes.

Some opportunities for me, I should say.

And that now you're more involved in kind of NCAA matters.

You know, when you work in a conference office, you're one of only maybe 30 people in the country who do what you do.

So there was an exclusivity to it.

You know, NCAA tournament was coming to New Orleans.

We were involved with that.

You did a lot of different things.

You know, you got involved with scheduling, working with coaches, championship events.

Then we transitioned, right.

Waters is the next person that really connected me, not only to continuing conference work, but to also really, you know, he got us going with football at the Sunbelt.

People don't remember.

There was a time when the Sun Belt did not have football, but not only did we have to start a football conference, we had to have a football game.

And so we on the back of a napkin, we really filled out an outline of what the New Orleans Bowl started as and what it, you know, has become.

And now it's a mainstream bowl game.

Very important, to not only that conference, but all the teams and student athletes that participate in it.

So I've had a wonderful ride, through the conferences that all led up to the Southland opportunity.

you knew.

Being around Tom.

That he was destined, to make great strides and have great success professionally.

Tom was at the Sun Belt.

Was when television on the level of conference that the Sun Belt was at the Southland was kind of in its infancy.

And he sort of brought it in and made television a part of what we do.

in late 2002 Burnett was selected to become the 7th Commissioner of the Southland Conference He moved it█s headquarters to sports-centric Frisco, Texas starting the leagues first compr corporate sponsorship program and negotiated a 2020 ESPN deal the league█s first multimillion broadcast TV contract You know, Tom was ahead of his time when he talked about TV contracts, and it started in regional.

Right.

And some of those, you know, regional partnerships that really brought the Southland brand to the market.

I had the great benefit of a wonderful group of school presidents who hired me in 2003, many of which were foundational members of this league here in Louisiana.

And they really gave me the opportunity to, you know, be creative, build out, make some observations of what we were doing at the time.

You know, I had the, you know, the fortune of following Greg Sankey in this position.

Now, that was good and bad with that.

You know, the good news was Greg had, you know, left it in such wonderful, position for whoever succeeded him.

The bad part was you had to live up to what Greg Sankey had done through the years.

But, you know, we had opportunities.

We weren't doing much television, as you recall.

We weren't we didn't have a basketball tournament at a at a single location.

Some other things that evolved, as television evolved, you know, now the Southland Conference is really again.

And that Division one mainstream of digital broadcasting, hundreds of opportunities to watch those programs play.

it all started with a group of presidents that listen to you, that allowed you to do some things, maybe take some risk, maybe do something that may not work the first time, but they stuck with us and they kind of knew we were trying to move the needle.

But, without them and that support, it would have been difficult to do.

Tom kind of took the Southland Conference to a different level.

You know, when I first got in here and seeing what Tom has done with this conference, it's remarkable the job he did with it, you know.

And then there was a time late in his career here where all the conferences in the country were kind of splitting up and breaking up.

Tom deserves 100 percent credit for keeping this conference not just intact, but strengthen it.

You know, he did so much to get it to a position to where it is today.

And it's because of the hard work behind the scenes that Tom did.

You know, he kept this conference not just together, but he made it even stronger.

And that's 100% credit to Tom.

There was a time.

And I know you recall this because you tackled the challenge head on.

There was a time that the Southland Conference was not doing well academically, as well as many other conferences across the country, and you were part of a very instrumental, a groundbreaking NCAA effort to say, whoa, this is enough.

We've got to have standards, and we're going to reach them.

And there will be penalties to those that don't.

That was a heck of a challenge.

It really was.

You know, you know, we don't really talk about this, but there was a day and not just in the Southland, but across the NCAA, where you would take student athletes that were, you know, poor academically.

Let's be blunt about it.

There were non qualifiers, partial qualifiers.

Some were called.

They had to sit out a year.

They might lose a year.

And the Southland had a number of those student athletes.

And it was leading to some ultimately some poor academic performance because they weren't prepared for college academically.

It was hard for them to, you know, flip a switch and become, great academically to matriculate through and graduate at, which is the goal for all of us.

The NCAA came in and said, hey, we we need to do better with graduation rates.

The way we're going to do that is we're going to build a system that monitors, college athletes as they progress toward their degree, and they're going to have to do it in a manner that is kind of standard across Division one.

So when you think about that, all of a sudden the Southland really had to live up to, strangely enough, an Ivy League standard because they're a Division One member, just like our conference.

But we were in really bad shape, and I was named to this national committee that was, you know, going to be in charge of this.

And we started to talk about a penalty structure, which got my attention.

There were going to be penalties that essentially, you know, eliminated you from post-season play consideration.

No conference could survive that.

So I took the message back home to our membership.

Started with the coaches.

They weren't convinced this was going to happen.

Moved on to the athletic directors.

They kind of got it.

But it was when I sat down with that same presidential group, And that was a moment where the presidents locked in.

Got it.

You know, kind of realized, hey, we don't have resources, we don't have the staffing, but we want to be in Division one.

We want to have the benefits of that.

And to do that, we got to perform better academically.

And it was the presidents who really turned the ship around, in the middle of a canal.

Or bayou.

I mean, that was a huge lift for this conference.

And ever since then, I would say that this conference is in a much better shape academically.

He led the community effort that attracted the NCAA Division one FCS Championship game to Frisco, and served on ten NCAA committees, councils and task forces, highlighted by a five year term on the Division one Men's Basketball Committee, culminating by serving as its chairman in 2022.

I think the most vivid thing I remember about Tom, and the health and well-being of our student athletes was watching his leadership during 2020, during Covid.

And Tom, always with the student athletes health and well-being.

Whether it was testing, how were we going to have championship sporting events?

Americans should be thankful because at one point in time we weren't sure.

Of course, matters were returned where it was, but because of Tom and the things that he was able to take up and persuade that group to do what was right by the student athlete.

What I think sets Tom apart from from, a lot of others was his genuine concern for the student athlete.

First and foremost, student athletes.

Welfare was the most important thing for Tom Burnett.

But Tom did a great job of making every student athletes experience first class.

Yeah, he made everybody feel like they were the most important person in the world.

That says a heck of a lot about a leader.

His career as a trailblazer in college athletics earned him recognition as the 2024 recipient of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Dave Dixon Leadership Award Let's conclude with the, the chapter of what Tom Burnett is doing now.

Well, I'm, since I left the Southland in the spring of, 2022, I have started a consulting business, there in Frisco, Texas, where we live.

And a really I really try to stay in my wheelhouse of what I know and maybe take the lessons from 30 plus years that conference administration 20 or so as a commissioner and try to help, my friends and colleagues, really anywhere, to where we go in and, help a president, maybe help an athletic director, that's struggling in a certain area and try to, you know, help them with some, opportunities that, maybe they haven't thought of or, you know, need a little more focus on.

So we're really proud of that.

As an offshoot of that, we've developed kind of a boutique, name, image and likeness opportunity that's really exclusive in the state of Texas for students from Texas, schools that stay in state to go to college.

And we've had some really good results as we've worked through the first year of that.

So, yeah, we're staying busy.

A lot of people thought we retired after the Southland, but, not the case at all.

We're working hard and, hopefully doing some good things for people.

If you enjoyed this conversation.

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