Former Nebraska AD called out for hypocrisy on outrageous expenses

As the college sports world changes and tries to adapt to its reality at an alarming rate, the former Nebraska Cornhuskers athletic director Trev Alberts talked about what’s at the heart of the problem. Of course while he was doing that, others around the college football world were noticing that he probably didn’t own his part in the problem quite as much as he should.

“We’re not very good at running businesses,” Alberts said of college athletic department administrators during the SEC spring meetings. “Let’s just be honest, and I’m raising my hand as one who’s part of that. We’ve just always had enough increasing revenue to overcome dumb expenses.”

“I’ve said it 100 times and I’ll say it again, we don’t have a revenue problem in college athletics, we have an expense problem,” he continued.

“The fundamental business of college athletics has been altered and changed forever,” said Alberts, a former star linebacker with the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the early 1990s. “I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, it’s just going to be different. Our ability to adjust and adapt will be critical, and it’s true that historically we’ve not been very good at that.”

Former Nebraska Cornhuskers AD called out for interesting comments on expenses

Alberts was giving this speech about two months after he abruptly left the Nebraska Cornhuskers for College Station, a departure that left leaders and fans in Lincoln reeling.

However, it wasn’t how he left Lincoln that drew the ire of social media accounts on Thursday. It was his complaints about out of control spending in the wake of his part in that.

Former KegsnEggs writer and now podcaster Adam Kramer was among the first to point out some hypocrisy in Alberts’ comments. Kramer quote tweeted a post with the former Nebraska Cornhuskers athletic director’s comments and included a screenshot from an article about the firing of former football coach Scott Frost.

The screenshot Kramer shared pointed out that had Alberts waited just a few more weeks to fire Frost, he would have saved the university $7.5 million. Because Frost was fired before October 1, he was paid a $15 million buyout instead of $7.5 million.

The brilliance of Kramer’s post was that it went without comment. Simply the quote tweet and the screenshot. 

The message was clear. Trev Alberts isn’t one to be taken seriously when he talks about the need to change spending habits. Even if every single Nebraska Cornhuskers fan agreed with the firing at the time.