North Carolina took an unusual route in establishing a succession plan for athletic director Bubba Cunningham, coming amid a new landscape of revenue sharing in college athletics.
Cunningham will move next summer into a new advisory role, while the school is hiring an auto racing executive in RFK Racing team president Steve Newmark for a transitionary position before becoming Cunningham’s successor in 2026.
UNC announced the plan Tuesday, one coming without a public announcement of a search process. Rather, the news simply dropped on the same day as the official start of revenue sharing where schools can begin directly paying athletes following the $2.8 billion House antitrust settlement.
Going from college athletics lifer to NASCAR outsider certainly illustrates the major changes afoot for North Carolina.
“Now it’s time for somebody else to continue to build on the things we’ve had and make sure that we continue to grow as a department, and support the kids,” Cunningham said. “We’ve got revenue shares, we’ve got to figure that out. And so all of that, I just think now’s the time.
“I think it’s a really good time for me to say, ‘Hey, we’ve gotten it to here, let’s hand it off to somebody else’ — but I can stay involved in some other projects on the campus.”
To that point, the transition includes a two-year contract extension through July 2029 for the 63-year-old Cunningham, who took over as athletic director in late 2011. He will move to advising chancellor Lee Roberts and eventually Newmark on projects tied to athletics, according to the school’s release.
“Yeah, I want to be a part of Carolina,” Cunningham said. “It’s a cool spot.”
There’s plenty to discuss beyond athlete compensation, too. That includes the future home for the Tar Heels’ tradition-rich men’s basketball program, whose Smith Center campus home turns 40 in January and will eventually need to be renovated or replaced — a subject Cunningham has spent years examining closely.
“We’re going to have to do something with basketball in the next few years,” Cunningham said. “I think I can be helpful in that area.”
Cunningham said talks about creating a succession plan reached to his last contract extension in 2022. But UNC never publicly launched a search, with spokesman Kevin Best saying the process was approved by Roberts and the president of the state’s public university system overseeing the Chapel Hill campus.
“The chancellor has the authority to forgo a search process for high-level positions when circumstances call for it,” Best said. “We believed the best fit for our program could be identified through a deliberate, careful and quiet process.
“The fact that we landed on such a qualified individual to work with Bubba to continue to modernize our approach to athletics is confirmation that saving the resources a search firm would have required was appropriate. We look forward to having two strong leaders in Carolina’s athletic department working together.”
UNC’s announcement touted Newmark’s experience in sponsorships, marketing and contract negotiations, arriving at the fourth anniversary of athletes being able to profit from use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) and the arrival of revenue sharing.
Newmark — president of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing for 15 years — arrives in August and will spend the 2025-26 season as an executive associate AD reporting to Cunningham. The school said the initial focus will be “revenue-driving initiatives” for Newmark, a Chapel Hill native whose served on an advisory committee in the hiring of Bill Belichick as football coach in December.
“With collegiate athletics undergoing massive changes at all levels, UNC is well positioned to take advantage of the new landscape,” Newmark said in a statement.
Cunningham’s tenure notably included elevating Hubert Davis to take over as men’s basketball coach when Hall of Famer Roy Williams retired in April 2021. It also included navigating UNC through a multi-year NCAA infractions case tied to academic courses popular with athletes, a case that reached a no-penalty conclusion in October 2017.
Cunningham has also championed UNC’s long-held philosophy of offering a “broad-based” program with 28 varsity sports, including national championship winners like men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s lacrosse, and field hockey. Paying for that becomes trickier with more money flowing to the revenue-driving sports like football and men’s basketball, a challenge Cunningham will eventually hand to Newmark.
“All year long we think we have programs that can compete for a national championship — and not everybody can say that,” Cunningham said.
“I’ve been concerned about that for years, that the money is going to gravitate toward a select few — and it might nationally,” he added later. “But I don’t think it’s going to here. People have really stepped up in those endowments and we’re going to have to continue to push that, because that makes us a really special place to be.”
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