Athletic Director
Long desiring an administrative role, Dye left Seattle in 1959 to become the athletic director at Wichita State University, at an annual salary of $13,000. After three years, he moved up to the Big Eight Conference at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1962. Prior to hiring Dye, the Nebraska football program had an all-time winning percentage of less than 62%, and had a lackluster two decades; Dye hired Bob Devaney from Wyoming following the 1961 season as head coach and since their arrival in 1962 (ending 2005), the Husker football winning percentage is just over 81%, which is by far the highest winning percentage in that period in the nation. Dye also hired head basketball coach Joe Cipriano, the scrappy leader from his Final Four team at Washington. Cipriano coached the Huskers for 17 seasons, until his death from cancer in 1980. Dye moved on to Northwestern University in 1967 and retired in 1974 at age 59.
Read more about this topic: Tippy Dye
Famous quotes by athletic director:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)