The resignation of Mike Bohn as USC’s athletic director was quickly followed by emerging reports of Bohn’s inappropriate and unprofessional behavior toward office and departmental colleagues at both USC and Cincinnati. While the USC part of the story was completely unacceptable and — on its own — sufficient reason for Bohn to be pushed out of his position, the eye-grabbing part of the story was that Bohn left behind a trail of wreckage at Cincinnati. This was new to a lot of people. USC obviously did not find these damning details when it went about the process of hiring Bohn from UC.
The question was asked the past week, and it was (is) a necessary one: Why did USC not get crucial information on Bohn? What happened in the vetting process which caused USC to fall short in unearthing instances of bad behavior?
Now we have our answer, courtesy of reporting from The Athletic, which unearthed a very revealing quote from a source. This one quote sums up why USC’s vetting process toward Bohn turned out to be woefully inadequate.
USC used the firm Turnkey Search when looking for its new athletic director in 2019, following the resignation of embattled AD Lynn Swann.
The Athletic reported (led by main reporter Justin Williams and helped by contributing reporting from Nicole Auerbach and Bruce Feldman):
“Those involved with the search received positive feedback from former-Cincinnati president Santa Ono, who hired Bohn in 2014, and other high-level administrators at the university, a source briefed on the process told The Athletic. Bohn passed a standard background check. But part of the reason an institution uses a search firm is for discretion, which meant there were limitations on how deep the vetting process could go without news of a candidacy leaking.”
“’You can’t call up every low-level employee in the athletic department,’ the person briefed on the search said.”
That’s it. That one quote, right there, explains why Bohn’s behavior didn’t come to light.
A full and complete search — a true investigation into Mike Bohn’s (or any other candidate’s) history — has to include talking to lower-level staffers. Getting feedback only from higher-ups, and not from the full athletic department staff, gave USC a deficient and incomplete picture of Mike Bohn.
The obvious point is that if any leader of a department can’t work and relate well with lower-tier employees, he or she is not much of a leader. While it’s true that an athletic director needs to make powerful and wealthy people (donors, boosters, chief administrators, football coaches) happy, he also runs a large department and supervises a lot of workers behind the scenes.
We can debate whether this fatal flaw belongs only to Turnkey or is a trait shared by other search firms, but this much is clear: Schools need to do full investigations of candidates and interview lower-level employees. If that wasn’t the industry standard in 2019, it has to be the industry standard in USC’s current AD search, and in future AD (and head coaching) searches around the country.
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