UNM AD Fernando Lovo talks about what's next for Lobo athletics

Fernando Lovo’s crash course, Athletic Director 101, continues.

Not yet 60 days into being UNM’s vice president for athletics, the 36-year-old Lovo, a first-time AD who started in December, has already dealt with a lot.

In his first week on the job, Lovo had to launch a national search for a new football coach. About two months later, the department’s most senior administrator, Assistant Vice President and Deputy Athletic Director David Williams, announced he will be leaving. Finding coaching and assistant AD replacements is in addition to Lovo juggling new-job matters like learning how to log into email, trying to remember that guy’s name in accounting or finding out where the break room is.

This month, Lovo also has to learn the always-tricky dance of playing New Mexico politics with lawmakers in Santa Fe at this year’s legislative session — a task vital to the funding of Lobo Athletics.

But with all that change comes something else: Opportunity. So much transition gives the new AD a chance to make things his own, in a manner of speaking, much faster than many in his position.

So, what does that look like? It’s a process that started even before Williams announced his departure.

“I had already started the wheels in motion looking at what a restructure would look like, and what makes the most sense for New Mexico,” Lovo told the Journal. “It’s not just copy and paste from what you’ve seen, elsewhere. There are things you know and you’ve seen that work. How do you want to incorporate them into the structure (at UNM)? Certainly, that plays a role.

“But I’ve also been meeting one on one with each staff member over the last couple of weeks. I’m slowly making my way through trying to get everybody, which has been so helpful to me, because I’ve been able to take myself down to the day-to-day operation of who does what. What have they been doing? What are their strengths? Where can we improve?”

It’s something one of Lovo’s mentors, Texas Athletic Director Chris Del Conte, a New Mexico native, did with Longhorns Athletics, one of the largest departments in terms of staff size and revenue.

“I remember sitting in that meeting when he was getting to know me,” Lovo said. “And when I walked out of there, I thought, ‘If I ever get an opportunity to run the show, that’s certainly something I’m going to do.’”

Like any industry, college athletics evolves. And some tasks that were once the focus of many might be under one person’s umbrella now, just as new challenges might now require entirely new job descriptions or even new positions.

Maybe the best example of the need for restructuring within a college athletics department is figuring out how to tackle the impending changes coming from the House vs. the NCAA settlement.

“House” is an antitrust case (with its next hearing in federal court scheduled for April 7) that in oversimplified terms would allow universities to share about $20 million a year in revenue with student athletes. But who oversees it?

“Obviously in this new world of college athletics, whether it’s (revenue sharing) or House settlement, and (NIL) collective, what’s going to happen with that? I mean, revenue is king and money is king, right? And we’ve got to find ways to pull every lever possible to increase our revenues and generate what we need to sustain the championship level of success that we’ve seen over the last few years,” Lovo said.

“I said it before, and I’ll say it again, what (former Athletic Director) Eddie (Nuñez) was able to do in building a championship-level culture here is really incredible. So, ensuring we don’t take a step back, but also modernizing, or if you want to say the word professionalizing the approach in some areas to adapt and change with the times, is something that I’ve been keenly focused on.”

Figuring out the best way to run a department is a process that started even before Lovo landed the UNM job.

“What I can tell you is that with this transition (Williams’ departure), and some of the other transition that we’ve had right when I got here and even a little bit before I got here (departures of Nuñez and even longtime department mainstay Ryan Berryman over the summer) — just trying to plug the pieces and get folks in the right place with the right buckets of responsibility, if you would, for an executive level. ...

“It’s a team effort, right? My executive team — I’m going to rely heavily on those folks, and they’re going to be in the room for big decisions, and we meet regularly, and we’re going to talk and have those hard conversations and make the decisions that need to be made to be successful in this new age of college athletics.”

Lovo is now close to forming his executive team and doesn’t anticipate waiting much longer to start implementing some of the structural changes he has been contemplating.

Maybe we’ll at least let him start his third month on the job before that happens.