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Frank Cuervo, UA Little Rock’s director of athletics, has spent nearly three decades in the business of intercollegiate competition, and he says there has never been a dull moment.
“It’s incredible. You know, this is my 28th year working in intercollegiate athletics and I can’t remember a time where there was this much change, this fast. If you were to rewind the clock even five or six years ago, the landscape would look entirely different when you look at different periods, you know, throughout the almost 200-year history of college sports,” said Cuervo, who appeared on this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics.
In the age of name, image and likeness (NIL) change and the realignment of collegiate conferences, Cuervo compared the upheaval that college sports is undergoing to the disruption of Title IX almost five decades ago. Title IX was a federal law that prohibited sex discrimination in educational programs that received federal funding.
“I’m not sure there’s been this much disruption and change since the advent of Title IX nearly 50 years ago. And there were a lot of good things that came from that. Women’s sports have exploded and it was really a seminal time for college sports and athletics in general,” he said. “So I’m hopeful that once some of the tides settle that we’ll be in a similar position and that this era will produce this type of positive results that the Title IX era did.”
Cuervo – who has done stints at University of Illinois Chicago, UAB, Missouri State, Indiana and Missouri – came to UA Little Rock as its new athletics director in 2024. He said he foresees several more years of major change before a “new normal” comes into existence. A pending settlement in a case known as House vs. NCAA will usher in a sea change for college sports.
The case is expected to determine how $2.576 billion will be distributed in backpay to student-athletes and should allow NCAA schools to compensate their own student-athletes directly.
“I would say that the ground under our feet is not particularly stable right now,” said Cuervo. “This House settlement hopefully will be ratified on April 7th. Ironically, it’s the same day as the college basketball National Championship game. How’s that for irony?”
“I think once that’s brought to some fruition and there’s some finality there, then we can really start to plan and decide what our new normal is. You know, we’ve been modeling and have a couple of different plans in place and have started to make some distinct decisions. But once that’s final, that will really allow us to be able to determine how we use these new rules to our advantage,” he added.
Once the House case is finalized, Cuervo wants UA Little Rock to bring its NIL management in-house for a number of reasons.
“Heretofore, it’s been a situation where that all had to be external. So whether it was a company or there are organizations called collectives that have developed that have a loose tie to the university, they will now – provided that this House settlement is ratified – that’s all going to be able to come in-house. So as an institution, as a university, and an athletics program, we will be able to work directly with a student athlete to, in effect, extend their scholarship. Not only to include, you know, room, board, tuition and fees, but also to include name, image, and likeness rights. So that’s a significant change,” he said.
“I think actually bringing it in-house and allowing the institutions to administer it is a step toward providing some guardrails… [it] will allow us to have a degree of control,” he added. “We’ll be able to work with our student athletes to administer that, bring some uniformity to it across all sectors of college athletics to make sure that it’s actually happening for the right reasons.”
Watch Cuervo’s full interview in the video below.
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