FAU bets its future on a fundraising guy

FAU football has been searching for an identity for a while now, and instead of chasing a splashy coaching name, the school is going a different direction: hiring a fundraiser. Pete Thamel reported FAU is set to bring in Josh McCowan, currently Mississippi State's deputy AD and Chief Revenue Officer, as its new athletic director.

Pete Thamel

@PeteThamel

Sources: FAU is set to hire Mississippi State deputy AD and Chief Revenue Officer Josh McCowan as the school’s new athletic director. McCown brings and extensive fundraising background and impressed the FAU brass with a modern AD skill set. He’s also worked at Kansas State and Colorado prior to MSU.

The pitch on McCowan is pretty simple: he's a money guy in an era where being a money guy might matter more than anything else in college sports. Per ESPN, McCowan helped Mississippi State pull in more than $173 million in fundraising over just three years, the school's best three-year stretch on record. That's the resume FAU brass reportedly fell in love with, along with what Thamel described as a modern AD skill set.

McCowan isn't walking in blind to the college athletics grind, either. Before Starkville, he spent nearly a decade at Kansas State, where he holds two degrees, and also worked in development and fundraising at Colorado. Two very different programs, two very different fanbases, one common thread — he's been in the business of getting boosters to open their wallets.

The timing matters, too. He's stepping into a job that's been open since Brian White bounced for the Virginia Tech AD gig six weeks ago, leaving FAU without a permanent lead voice as it tries to figure out revenue-sharing, NIL and where football fits in a Group of Five landscape that's getting squeezed by conference realignment money. FAU has flirted with relevance since its Lane Kiffin days but hasn't found real consistency since, and in this era that's as much a fundraising problem as a coaching one.

So this isn't really a football hire — it's a survival hire. If McCowan can bring even a fraction of that Mississippi State fundraising energy to Boca Raton, FAU might finally have the financial runway to compete for the kind of coaches and rosters it's been priced out of. He's set to be formally introduced on campus August 7, and from there the real work — closing the gap between FAU's ambitions and its budget — starts immediately.