How Tennessee AD Danny White turned Rocky Top into a college sports business behemoth
There’s a harmony echoing over the Smoky Mountains these days.
On September Saturdays, the orchestral sounds of “Rocky Top” encapsulate this East Tennessee bliss. The song serves as something that’s equal parts battle cry and ballad. It’s a connector of past and present; of fathers and sons; of football games won and lost.
On cool fall afternoons in Knoxville, Tenn., one might scan Neyland Stadium, this place of college football nirvana, the sounds of 100,000 voices singing in unison and wonder how it could ever fade from the spotlight.How wrong you’d be.
“Our fans call it 20 years of wilderness,” Tennessee Athletic Director Danny White said of the time preceding his arrival in 2021. “But my perception coming up, Tennessee was one of those iconic brands with unbelievable history — not just in football and women’s basketball, but it was a broad-based, really high-level athletic program brand.”
Those inside Neyland Stadium have belted “Rocky Top” with an optimistic fervor of late. Two decades of searching and an athletic department operating in perpetual chaos feel as if those issues extend far past the days of Johnny Majors patrolling the Volunteers’ sidelines.
White, the man orchestrating the operatic renaissance of Tennessee athletics, nestled into one of the gray leather chairs in the center of his office, a smile cresting on his face as he reflected on his four years overseeing the department.
There’s an aura about White. He’s both inviting and stern. Pensive and performative. It’s little surprise he made his hay in fundraising, or that his first foray into college athletics was recruiting basketball players in the Mid-American Conference years ago.
White could have done anything, those closest to him insist. Basketball coach. Wall Street. Whatever.
Instead, he settled on the profession that his father, Kevin — the longtime AD at Duke and Notre Dame — told his five kids to avoid like the plague, run in the opposite direction of and don’t think about touching.Those warnings landed with as much consequence as the right hook of a punch-drunk boxer. Three of the five White children work in college athletics. A father’s suggestion can have that effect.
For Danny, to have rebuilt the department along the banks of the Tennessee River is no small task. This is a place where coups and power plays from university brass come like the tide, and where pitchfork-esque protests have sent even the most beloved Vols packing.
But amid all the zaniness that lurks beneath the surface in Knoxville, through a precise process, sheer will and an alignment that long eluded his predecessors, White has managed to mechanize one of America’s most complex athletic departments to run like a Ferrari with an efficiency that would make Henry Ford jealous.That, at least in part, is why White is Sports Business Journal’s 2025 Athletic Director of the Year.
“If he wasn’t running this athletic department, he could be the CEO of any major corporate or Fortune 500 company and do extraordinarily well,” quipped UT System President Randy Boyd. “He’s that kind of business leader.”
