The complexity of Mike Bohn, simply stated: His people skills were great with some (Lincoln Riley) but awful with others at USC.
In the wake of Mike Bohn’s resignation — and more reporting on just how poorly he behaved behind the scenes at both USC and Cincinnati — it is true that Bohn did embarrass the University of Southern California. That is a plain reality which can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.
One might therefore respond by saying that Bohn was a failure at USC and that the USC brand has been damaged even more by Bohn’s actions. Such a reaction is logical and reasonable.
On the other hand, Mike Bohn hired Lincoln Riley, Lindsay Gottlieb, and Andy Stankiewicz. He moved USC to the Big Ten (with help from Brandon Sosna). One might therefore respond by saying Mike Bohn was a successful athletic director at USC. Such a reaction is logical and reasonable.
The purpose of this short article is to make a point clear: How we talk about and evaluate Mike Bohn’s tenure requires a simple but important distinction which should apply to lots of situations in other workplaces: People can fail at their jobs and still achieve very real goals which tangibly and materially improve situations. What makes Mike Bohn’s story even more complicated is that he was able to raise runds at USC and Cincinnati and hire some amazing coaches — Lincoln Riley at USC and Luke Fickell at Cincinnati, plus Gottlieb and Stankiewicz in other sports at USC — which points to great people skills. Yet, when working with athletic department colleagues, Bohn’s people skills were nonexistent and/or awful. His people skills were very selectively applied. He was and is that complicated as an athletic director.
How do we talk about someone such as Mike Bohn? The right balance is this:
Bohn was not a success. He was not a good athletic director or leader. He failed at so many aspects of an athletic director’s job … but he succeeded at the one aspect of the job so many people pay attention to: hiring great coaches.
Bohn damaged the morale of a workplace. He very directly hurt female work colleagues with his behavior toward them. No one who does those things is successful in a larger, truer, or more meaningful sense. Yet, Bohn’s tenure and some of its key decisions can be tied to really good (improved) results on the playing fields and courts. It’s not as though on-field performance didn’t improve; it did.
In the end, Mike Bohn did embarrass USC. He hurt the school’s reputation. He hurt other people. He was rightly pushed out. The school, by all appearances, realized this instead of sweeping it under the rug, and that’s a credit to Carol Folt.
Yet, the value of the USC athletic director job is greater than ever before, with football, basketball (men and women), baseball, and other sports rising to the top of collegiate athletics. This is a prized position in part because of what Mike Bohn did. We can’t exactly say USC is in a worse position than it was before Bohn arrived. Bohn definitely improved the athletic department in ways Pat Haden and Lynn Swann never did. No one can debate that point strictly in relationship to football, women’s basketball, and baseball performance. It’s not a defense of Bohn, merely a plain observation about the status of sports programs at the school over time.
USC’s reputation was damaged, but its position has been improved. That’s a complicated pair of realities, coexisting together.
How do we talk about Mike Bohn? It’s complicated.
Bohn, as a person and as a professional, cannot be regarded as a success. He shouldn’t be described as a successful person, someone who did his job well.
Mike Bohn did a few specific parts of his job (hiring coaches, also fundraising) well, but he neglected most parts of an athletic director’s job description. We could simply say that Brandon Sosna and other tireless workers in the USC athletic department during Bohn’s tenure deserve most of the credit for what happened these past few years. That’s probably the best way to look at all of this, minimizing Bohn’s presence and not allowing on-field success to unduly glorify Bohn for an anything-but-glorious tenure in which he did so much damage (damage which is coming to light in a steady stream of new reports).
Yet, if we’re being fully accurate, we can’t simply say Bohn had no role or influence in achieving any of those tangible successes. That wouldn’t be entirely true, and therefore his failures should not lead us to whitewash his achievements.
The right tone, the right balance, is struck this way: Don’t call Mike Bohn a success or a successful athletic director. He was fundamentally a failure. Yet, within that failure to lead an athletic department and represent a university with integrity, some really good things happened with the help of some great people who worked under him in very difficult conditions.
If a coach wins games but presides over ugly scandals, that coach wasn’t a success, but the larger failure doesn’t mean the coach wasn’t good at the actual on-field aspect of coaching. It’s kinda like that with Bohn. We shouldn’t amplify the skill at doing one or two things, but we shouldn’t pretend that skill never existed or never achieved anything, either.
We can leave it there without glorifying Bohn or pretending his accomplishments never existed. We can allow the darkness and the light to coexist.
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