Home Mailbag: I learned today that I, apparently, hate UVA Athletics Director Carla Williams
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Mailbag: I learned today that I, apparently, hate UVA Athletics Director Carla Williams

Chris Graham
carla williams
UVA President Jim Ryan, football coach Tony Elliott and Athletics Director Carla Williams at the groundbreaking for the new Virginia Football Operations Center. Photo: UVA Athletics

It’s Carla’s job to create the best possible athletic program at UVA, and she is certainly doing that. If winning teams won’t put fans in the seats, I don’t know what she is expected to do.

Jack

This email started a back-and-forth with a reader who, I would learn, thinks the only reason that I have written critically of Carla Williams, the athletics director at UVA, in the context of the lack of progress at getting fans to attend football games at Scott Stadium, is because I’m an “attack dog for a particular segment of the UVA community.”

I hate to break it to Jack, but it appears to be a very particular one-man segment for which I am the attack dog.


ICYMI: Carla Williams


I don’t see why it’s something to get bent out of shape over. I’ve written, numerous times, about how UVA Football is leaving millions of dollars on the field with the seas of empty seats every Saturday, and how that is, ultimately, Job Responsibility #1 for the AD, given that only two sports in any college athletics department make money, and football is by far the bigger moneymaker of those two.

The job for an AD is a lot more than just hiring coaches and scheduling games.

UVA Athletics ran on a $140.9 million operating budget in fiscal-year 2022. Of that, $51.2 million came from football, which operated at a $20 million surplus in FY 2022.

The issue that I’ve raised is that, specifically, ticket sales for football have lagged, on average, $7.5 million per season, over the past five non-COVID football seasons, behind ticket sales down the road at Virginia Tech, which no one can argue has been any more successful on the field over that time than UVA has.

UVA, since 2018, has compiled a 34-37 record; Tech, since 2018, is 35-39.

The folks at Tech are making literally twice as much money from football ticket sales over the past five non-COVID seasons without having a winning team to put fans in the seats.

That’s because there’s the football side to football, and then there’s the business side to football, and the problem at UVA right now isn’t so much the failure on the football side of football, but on the business side.

I can’t tell you why literally no one else writes about this, though I can speculate.

When I pointed this out to Jack, he wrote me back to tell me that the real issue is “you have never been a fan of Carla’s from the beginning, and she’s done a lot and doing a lot to build the whole program, including football.”

I don’t know how to make this point, which I’ve made, it seems, a million times, but it’s not my job to be a fan of anybody.

From my email back to Jack:

I don’t work for UVA Athletics. They pay people to handle PR for them, and there are plenty of people in the local media who parrot the party line.

Facts are facts: 20K empties every Saturday translate into millions of dollars in revenues lost.

How that can’t be a top priority for the AD there is something that needs to be asked and answered.

I ask frequently. I’d love to be able to speak with Carla to get her thoughts, but she doesn’t do interviews with low-lifes like me.

Jack’s response:

Maybe that’s because you’re always on the attack and seldom have ever give her credit for anything she’s done.

Gotta admit, he got me there.

Yeah, that one hurt, man.

My life is doomed to being incomplete because I’ve not been able to land a sit-down interview with Carla Williams, and it’s of my own doing, because I’m a big meanie.

However will I go on?

You can detect the sarcasm, no doubt.

To be blunt, I wouldn’t expect to get anything substantive from a Carla Williams interview if I’d ever end up getting one, any more than I’d expect to get anything substantive from an interview with a politician.

People who run $140 million budgets don’t reveal anything in interviews.

She certainly wouldn’t do more than dance around and then away from any difficult questions on why the athletics department hasn’t been able to make any gains in football ticket sales in her seven years on the job.

If the worst thing that Carla Williams confronts in the course of a day on the job is that I get several thousand clicks on my most recent story on lagging UVA Football ticket sales, it hasn’t been a bad day for Carla Williams.

Part of me keeps hoping that, by writing the stories on that topic, that I’ll light a fire under Williams and her top staff, and that maybe they’ll start doing something to try to get more people to want to be a part of UVA Football, which in turn will translate into more ticket revenues and, downstream, lighten the load on students who have to make up the difference through the $16.1 million in activity fees that are used to balance the books for UVA Athletics.

But then there’s the other part of me that has come to the conclusion that Williams, UVA President Jim Ryan and the UVA Board of Visitors just don’t care that students have to foot the bill for an athletics program that isn’t making every dollar it can because of their basic incompetence.

The Jacks of the world think they can shame me into silence from telling the truth.

Whoever it was that got Mike Barber to call me “fringe media” underestimated me.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019, and Team of Destiny: Inside Virginia Basketball’s Run to the 2019 National Championship, and The Worst Wrestling Pay-Per-View Ever, published in 2018. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].