Troy Dannen
Nebraska Athletic Director
Introductory Press Conference
March 26, 2024

“Okay I just learned we have a clear bag policy at the stadium, my wife is set. Wow, how’s your week? Mine has been something else, but it has been the best week of my professional life, and I think it is going to lead to the best times of my personal life. Thank you so much for this opportunity. President Kabourek, thank you. The trust and the confidence that you placed in me and my family to come here. I know what this place is and think I can stand here and be a part of it in this role. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for all of us, everyone in my family. I will clarify though, President Kabourek made one mistake. He said it was about 4 a.m., it was 3:51 a.m. when we actually executed. I know I was going to come work for the right guy because at 2 o’clock he figured out how to execute a DocuSign agreement from someplace in his house. We got that thing done and signed at 3:51. 3:51 is like our time now, so if your phone ever rings at 3:51 I expect you to answer it because it’s kind of our time. Really appreciate you and it did go fast forward. It was something else, and it will be a story I will tell for the rest of my life. Chairman (Rob) Schafer, appreciate you being here and I want you to know, I will work on behalf of this athletic department day in and day out, but I will work with the regents on behalf of this University and behalf of this state. I’ll look forward to being a part of everything, not just the athletic department that this job brings. Governor Pillen, and we had a great call doing this search process, and I think what the Governor did, just like what he did today, was affirmed to me why this job and this place was going to mean so much. Everything is about people. Everything is about relationships. I thought I knew then when I got off the phone with the governor, I was like ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ He sold me. He didn’t really have to sell me because I think I was sold already, but he did affirm for me everything about this state, and it’s about its people. And it’s going to be a great honor and a great privilege to live and work in the state of Nebraska, Governor. Thank you very much. My time at Washington was certainly shorter than I expected to be when I went there. I do want to thank President Cauce for giving me the opportunity and all the support that everyone at Washington gave me. I wish nothing but the best for everyone at Washington and appreciate what they did for me. A lot of supporters here. A lot of alums, coaches, staff, student-athletes. Really appreciate you taking the time to be here. I can not even begin to express how much I’m looking forward to working alongside you, but I also want to spend a minute on Dennis (Leblanc). It’s his leadership not just in the last few days but it’s his leadership here for four decades. I’ve known the man now for six whole days. He’s been a great help for me in starting to understand the lay of the land. In his tenure by the way, he signed two contract extensions for two basketball coaches. When you have a one week tenure and you extend two basketball coaches, it is not interim. As we don’t have an Interim president, we don’t have an interim athletic director so Dennis, thank you so much for everything you did along the way. Most importantly, I will not look at them right now but I will thank my family. I will have a tendency to get emotional and I will get emotional about my family. You met Amy and William and Elle, but my older daughters Emily and Holly who aren’t here and then Amy’s sister Krista who is here, six and some odd months pregnant, seven and some odd months, I don’t know, you’re pregnant. Her husband, Tony, they live in Des Moines, the fact that they could be here today. This career, this job, all of us who work in college athletics, it's got it’s up and it’s got its down it is not easy to live with someone who goes through the emotions of what this brings. Number one I appreciate her being able to live with me during these times. This school year I’ve taken them on a particularly wild, emotional ride. Things that I’m not sure happen to anybody.  I have a Rockstar of a wife, amazing kids and we have superstars around us. I love you dearly. I really appreciate you letting me do this. Particularly, coming here so we can all be together in Nebraska. That said, one of the best hires I’ve made in my career is Tyler Kai who is sitting down here. Tyler is a Nebraska native as a baby but you left you grew up in Iowa. I hired him from Tennessee like in the infancy of his career at Tulane. He was there for two years. He went from here to running the whole advancement and development operation for us. About three years ago, he got a call to come to Nebraska. He reminded me this week of what I said to him when he came to my office to talk about the job. I said, ‘You know if Nebraska calls, you have to take the job.’ So he left, and I gave him that advice, and I realized I was thinking about this job when I first got this call. ‘Why did I gave him the advice?’ When I was my son’s age, Nebraska was the center of the universe in college football. We were winning national championships. I still hear Keith Jackson’s voice calling these games. The reverence he had for this university and this program. I admired, and I wanted to be a part of it. When I was nine, I thought I was gonna be a part of it, and I realized genetically I had no chance to be a part of it in the way I wanted to be a part of it. I’ll give you a little bit of background on my athletic career. I was the backup kicker and the backup holder. When it was time for a pinch runner in the last inning of the game and everyone else had gone, that was my time. I was a 15th kid on the 13-man basketball roster and if there was a javelin catching position that’s where they would’ve put me. So it was not going to come on the field. My role or my path to getting involved in this was not on the field. When I went to Northern Iowa, Bob Bowlsby was the athletic director, a legend in athletics. He became my mentor to this day. He is the one guy I called when this search came about. He said, ‘Are you crazy? Take that job.’ That’s what I wanted to hear. My mentor, affirming what my mom told me. We bonded a little bit over officiating because I also officiated. I officiated because I was coaching a group of sixth graders when I was in 12th grade and I got a technical foul and my principal was so offended by me that he said, ‘By golly you’re going to officiate and you’re going to learn to respect those officials.’ So I started to officiate. A lot has been said about, ‘I hope he’s a better athletic director than he is an official.’ I just have to remind everyone that Fred (Hoiberg) is unbeaten in games that I have officiated. I was pretty doggone good. I’ll see if I can’t work the Big Ten Championship game next year. All that, a different path but all that led me back to the center of the universe, Nebraska Athletics. A crazy, circuitous route but it led me back here and I’m so thrilled that it did. Chris mentioned that there’s so much momentum here right now, so much history, great coaches, the facilities are indescribable. Our student-athletes, the passion of the fans and I call that passion a ‘give-a-darn’ factor. I might use a different word for it from time-to-time but a give-a-darn factor and nothing beats a high give-a-darn factor and that give-a-darn factor exists here, every place throughout the state, throughout the university, throughout the department. I love being apart of a great give-a-darn factor but if you want to have a culture of success, those are the ingredients that will allow you to have success. I’ve been particularly pleased and probably what I did my most diligence on was about the alignment of the university. Alignment’s about common goals, common interests, common beliefs. Alignment is about the willingness of everybody to get stuff out of the way to allow the whole to succeed. Alignment’s not about decisions and it’s not about necessarily the people all being this, that and the order that they are. Alignment comes from the governor, it comes from the board, it comes from the president, it comes from the chancellor, it comes from our faculty, it comes from the student-athletes, it comes from the coaches. Alignment is everybody willing to move mountains to put people in a position to succeed. That’s alignment. The alignment here is as good as I’ve seen any place. This is 17 years for me as an athletic director. I know the places I’ve been and I know the places I’ve been around, trust me. The alignment is here to allow success so that recipe, in order for us to make that recipe, to execute that recipe for success, alignment with all those things in place, we’ve got it all here. That’s why this job, it wasn’t just about coming home, it was about coming home and winning. It’s about coming home and seeing great things happen. I wasn’t going to come home just for the sake of coming home. I was in my office for about five minutes on Thursday before we went to Memphis. I called Coach Osborne. One it was a moment for me because as I grew up watching this, it was Coach Osborne, it was not just about how he won, it was how I perceived he won and how I understood he built this thing and how he did it. I called him because page one, paragraph one of ‘how to be an athletic director’ handbook is ‘do no harm.’ One of the most important things to me is to understand the culture, understand how we got here and I’ll sit down face-to-face with Coach, hopefully that’s this week. I want to understand the history. I want to understand the culture and I want to understand the philosophy of how we built what we built here. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to sit down with coaches, staff, student-athletes and I want to learn what they think makes this place special. If you asked my priority from day one, it’s listening and learning. I’ve had the greatest start to an athletic director tenure that anyone could ever have. I got to travel to Memphis, I got to be around thousands of Husker fans, it was incredible. I don’t know how many hands I shook and I don’t know how many voices I heard but I heard a lot and I talked to a lot of people. I’ve got a really good head start on what the culture is here and everybody wants and expects out of this place. I can promise you this. Nebraska will lead. We will not follow, we will lead. We’ll look around the corners. We’ll embrace whatever’s there even if we don’t like it. That’s how you lead. You embrace what’s there and off we go. The relationship our students-athletes have with the university is going to continue to change and evolve. You can speculate what it’s going to look like but, know this if you think, the last five years of college athletics have been wild, these next five years are going to put it to shame. There’s a lot happening, and I don’t think any of us know exactly what is going to happen. Nebraska though remember this Nebraska became one of the greatest brands in college sports for one reason, because we won. You know how we won because in ‘69 Devaney hired a strength coach when nobody knew strength coaches were ever going to be important. It’s because we took initiatives with our student athletes time and time again to elevate them and put them in a position to succeed. Our student-athletes, this is a great place to do things for them that nobody else is doing. We are a national leader. But today, it’s more than strength. It’s more than nutrition. It’s more than even the degree. It’s more than facilities. It’s more than giving them a laptop when they come. It’s more than, ‘Hey, we’re going to prepare you for success in your life.’ Success now is about innovation and NIL. It’s innovation and how we embrace the role of the student-athlete inside of our athletic department. Success is about our collective. You’re going to see me wearing 1890 stuff as much as I wear Nebraska stuff. Because it’s about this: recruitment and retention of our student-athletes. Number one. Five years ago nobody would’ve stood up here and told you that, but today number one. And how we do that is going to change over the years. But I’ve said this about Coach Rhule, when Coach Rhule was hired I thought that is the greatest coach. I’ve known Matt for quite awhile. That is the greatest coach, at the right time at the right place. He will win big here. Great job at recruitment. I just saw two coaches who went to the NCAA tournament, Amy (Williams and Fred (Hoiberg), who are great coaches. I’ve known Fred (Hoiberg) forever and I followed Amy (Williams), I once thought I was going to hire her when she was at Rogers State, but we just retained them because you don’t let good people get away. Same thing goes for student-athletes, recruitment and retention, that is our priority. You will see that from me over and over and over again. When you invest in student-athletes the investment pays off in ways we’ll never understand both for the whole, the collective, but certainly for the student-athletes and you will hear me over and over again asking you to invest in our student-athletes. Now I have a lot of goals, and I’m not going to tell you all of them, but I do have one expectation that I will be unyielding on. Nebraska Cornhusker athletics will be the standard by which everyone else will measure themselves. It doesn’t matter what job we have in the department and my staff will hear me say this. If you sell tickets, you sell tickets in a way that everyone else in the country will say that’s how you sell tickets. If you teach strength, then you’re going to do it in a way that everyone will say this is how strength should be taught. This is how academics should be done. We will set the standard in everything we do. Ultimately, though, I will say this. I don’t need to talk to anybody. I don’t need to talk to the coaches, I don’t need to talk to Coach (Tom) Osborne. Ultimately, we are going to win. We’re going to win Big Ten Championships, National Championships and academically. We’re going to win socially, with character and with integrity. At the end of the day, the greatest win of all that we will have here is our student-athletes will walk out of here and win for the next 40 years of their lives because of the experience they get at the University of Nebraska. That is our priority and mission. Sometimes it gets lost but we will recruit, we will retain and send everyone out of here a winner. That’s what the University of Nebraska is. This is the greatest time at the greatest of places and I will tell you my family and I are thrilled. It’s a great honor to be here. Go Big Red."