While writing last week about the University of Tulsa’s Hall of Fame Weekend activities, it occurred to me that Rick Dickson isn’t already in that Hall of Fame.
During the ’70s, Dickson was a Golden Hurricane football athlete. In 1990-94, he was the TU athletic director who hired the incredibly impactful Tubby Smith and hustled to score a 1991 Freedom Bowl situation for one of the better Golden Hurricane football teams ever.
Since 2020, when Dickson answered TU’s SOS call by returning to Tulsa (his hometown) from New Orleans, he has navigated Golden Hurricane athletics through a budget crisis and COVID-19.
He didn’t expect to make any coaching changes. Instead, in 2½ years, there were six: in football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, volleyball, rowing and women’s soccer.
Dickson rekindled donor relationships that had gone dry. He breathed hope and fresh energy into the athletic department. It’s baffling that he wasn’t a 2023 TU Athletic Hall of Fame inductee.
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If it happens during the spring of 2024 — and surely it will — the induction would occur only a few weeks before Dickson is expected to retire from his TU job and everyday athletics administration. He would resume a consulting practice established after he left Tulane in 2015, but now begins a 14-month countdown to Dickson’s expected exit from the University of Tulsa.
Dickson is non-committal when asked about the specific date of his stroll into retirement, but it is known that he has the flexibility to leave at any time and his contract will have expired on July 1, 2024.
When he returned during the fall of 2020, it was believed that Dickson would be at TU for less than a year. By the summer of 2024, his second tour of duty will have spanned nearly four years.
Is there any chance that Dickson might stay for one more year? You never say never, so I’ll concede that there’s a 1% chance. But I wouldn’t bet one cent on that chance.
The Dickson family dynamic has changed in a big way. Rick’s wife of 43 years, Brenda, also is a TU graduate. When they returned to Tulsa in 2020, they had two grandchildren. Life happens. Today, they have eight grandkids: a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, three 3-year-olds, a 2-year-old and two infants.
That’s the harsh reality for TU: Rick Dickson is a perfect athletic director for the Golden Hurricane, but he is 68 and wants the freedom to work on his terms, to savor chill time with his grandchildren, and to have beignet-and-coffee mornings with Brenda in the French Quarter.
It is not expected that anyone on the current TU athletics staff will be promoted to the athletic director position, so it appears university President Brad Carson’s search will be of an external nature.
The Oral Roberts University people will want to strangle me for this, but Carson’s first call should be to a young administrator who’s been a ball of difference-making fire for the Golden Eagle athletic department.
Tim Johnson, of course
When longtime ORU athletic director Mike Carter retired in 2021, he was succeeded by his top deputy — Tim Johnson, a Bartlesville native who attended Oklahoma State and got a law degree at the University of Arkansas.
Having moved to ORU from Clemson in 2015, the 41-year-old Johnson has been a star in Golden Eagle fund-raising and in marketing that resulted in a tremendous surge in basketball attendance and revenue.
It was Johnson who drove ORU’s decision to build premium suites in the Mabee Center. The popularity of those suites inspired to ORU to consider building even more.
Johnson has a history in college football. For then-Arkansas coach Houston Nutt in 2002-07, Johnson as a law student was a Razorback graduate-assistant coach.
At Clemson, Johnson was involved in several fund-raising projects related specifically to Tiger football. He also was a key figure in Clemson’s successful campaign to raise a billion dollars for athletics and myriad other university interests.
The most recent of Johnson’s big-ticket achievements was his design of ORU’s remarkable and recently completed Mike Carter Center. As he did the sketches, there was no funding or plan to actually build it. He just wanted to have something on paper, in case ORU were to secure the money for such a structure.
When ORU won twice as the 2021 NCAA Tournament’s most popular Cinderella, a donor stepped up with the gift that would take Johnson’s vision from legal-pad concepts to a 50,000-square-foot reality positioned a few steps south of the Mabee Center.
While the Mike Carter Center is a basketball practice facility outfitted with separate-but-equal gyms and amenities for the women and men, it also is loaded with a state-of-the-art space for strength and conditioning, locker rooms, meeting rooms and offices.
I’m not going to ask Dickson about Johnson’s TU viability when Dickson, presumably, still has more than a year remaining in his time at 11th and Harvard.
I very deliberately have not asked Tim Johnson whether he would be interested in becoming TU’s next athletic director. I’m sure he would say exactly what then-ORU basketball coach Bill Self said in 1997, after the Golden Hurricane job opened unexpectedly: I have a great job at Oral Roberts. I’m happy at Oral Roberts.
Three days later, Self was the Tulsa basketball coach.
After Dickson retires, Carson will need an aggressive, energetic people-person type of athletic director who can raise money and has an understanding of the wildly fluid nature of today’s college athletics.
When the time comes — as Rick and Brenda Dickson ride into the next chapter of their lives — Tim Johnson would be as natural a fit for University of Tulsa athletics as Bill Self was for University of Tulsa basketball 26 years ago.
‘It can’t be a rookie’
“I don’t know who it might be,” Rick Dickson says of his successor in the TU athletic director’s office, “but I know the profile of what that person — man or woman — should look like.”
Because of the current complexities of Division I administration, Dickson said, it would be “an impossible challenge” for a person with no college athletics background to flourish as an athletic director.
“It can’t be a rookie pilot,” Dickson said. “It has to be someone who knows the industry and what’s happening in the industry. Someone with some wherewithal in the industry, because of how much our industry has changed.
“You’re going to have to fight for your place. You have to know how to compete in this race (against schools) that have much bigger engines.”
As Dickson refers to the University of Tulsa’s status as the smallest school competing at the FBS level of college football, he adds, “This isn’t (a typical) job. It’s unique.”
Referring to the TU challenge of strengthening its support base in Tulsa County, Dickson said the athletic director must be “visible as the face (of the athletic department).
“You can’t delegate that here. You have to embrace that part of it. The next person has to be wired that way.”
Johnson is wired that way. He’s good with the media and with ORU alumni, and in all settings ranging from formal to relaxed.
A knowledge of the Tulsa market and its important people is preferred, Dickson stated. Johnson obviously is a locally connected guy.
I don’t know what Johnson is paid at ORU or what Dickson makes at TU. I do know this: the stakes are too high for TU extend a lowball offer to an athletic-director candidate. That person should be paid FBS-level money, which I’m thinking shouldn’t be less than a starting salary of $600,000.
On the whole, TU has a nice collection of sports facilities. H.A. Chapman Stadium and the Reynolds Center are attractive, comfortable places to watch ball. What TU most needs now is an indoor facility that would serve not only Hurricane football but all TU athletes and students.
Before Dickson leaves the university, is it possible that he may have secured the funding and formulated a plan for an indoor facility?
“I think it’s reasonable and doable,” he replied.
Ultimately, I can see this being the scenario: Dickson gets the ball rolling on an indoor-facility process and Johnson, as his successor as TU’s athletic director, closes the deal on the money component and design.
I don’t know what a University of Tulsa indoor facility would look like or where on campus it might be located, but I know what it should be named: the Rick Dickson Center.
Such a distinction would be especially sweet when bundled with Dickson’s 2024 TU Athletic Hall of Fame induction.