Confronted with daunting school sports activities panorama, Bernard Muir set to resign as Stanford AD

Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir, whose tenure spanned 13 years, two conferences and the deterioration of the Cardinal’s revenue-driving sports activities, is planning to resign from his place, a Hotline supply confirmed Monday.

President Jonathan Levin took cost of the college in August and, simply three months later, employed former quarterback Andrew Luck to supervise the soccer program — a transparent indication of Muir’s waning affect.

The Cardinal is anticipated to call an interim athletic director and conduct a nationwide seek for Muir’s substitute.

Prior Stanford expertise, both as an athlete or athletic division worker, must be prioritized.

The transfer comes at a important time for Stanford’s main sports activities, soccer and males’s basketball, that are struggling for traction throughout a interval of large change in school sports activities — change that, in lots of regards, runs counter to the college’s bedrock educational mission.

Stanford has been sluggish to regulate to call, picture and likeness and the switch portal. Whereas Muir was hardly the first purpose for the failure to adapt quickly, his successor should work successfully with the administration, head coaches and key donors alike. In any other case, success within the main sports activities will likely be tough to attain.

Muir, 56, was named Stanford’s athletics director in July 2012 after beforehand serving in the identical function at Georgetown and Delaware. He additionally climbed the ladder in Notre Dame’s athletics division, the place he labored within the early 2000s after a stint because the NCAA’s operations director for the lads’s Division I basketball event.

At Stanford, he was answerable for retaining, then in the end firing males’s basketball coach Johnny Dawkins, hiring after which firing Jerod Haase, then hiring Kyle Smith.

Throughout Muir’s tenure, the lads’s basketball workforce reached the NCAA Match as soon as.

The ladies’s basketball workforce made the NCAA Match annually of his time, although legendary coach Tara VanDerveer’s departure final spring has led to uncertainty. Stanford, below first-year coach Kate Paye, is on the outskirts of the NCAA bubble this season.

On the soccer entrance, he oversaw David Shaw’s departure in late 2022, then employed Troy Taylor.

Muir was in cost throughout the Varsity Blues scandal, the push to remove 11 varsity sports activities — the college ultimately reversed course — and Stanford’s admission into the ACC in the summertime of 2023.

Initially Printed: February 24, 2025 at 5:02 PM PST