Leaning in the corner, just outside the sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard patio at Joe Alleva’s gorgeous University Club home, are a few fishing poles.
From there, it’s just a few steps to the little lake behind the house, where the LSU athletic director enjoys an occasional evening casting session. Catch and release.
“You should have seen the size of one I got the other night,” Alleva says with a smile, holding his hands apart as if telling his football coach just how far he needs to get a first down.
Back inside the house, he admits that Annie, his wife of 39 years, gets credit for all the decorating and the sprinkling throughout of so many pictures of their three grown children and one precious granddaughter.
The Allevas were high-school sweethearts. They grew up together in Suffern, New York, and considering his success rate, they may retire together in Baton Rouge.
Life running all things LSU athletics is not completely filled with reviewing stadium expansions, solving game-day traffic issues and negotiating coaches’ salary packages.
Most days at lunchtime, the former Lehigh quarterback crosses the street from the LSU Athletic Administration Building, walks through Tiger Stadium, changes into a T-shirt and shorts and exercises in the same training facility used by most of his coaches and athletes.
The best part, he says, is getting to visit with many of LSU’s 450 student-athletes.
“(During the school year) there’s a kid working out right here and there’s a team or two in here, and I get to work out with them and watch how the strength coaches work with the kids,” Alleva says. “And when I go back to work, I’m refreshed.”
The elliptical machine is his favorite. He hits it hard for 30 minutes before finishing with 60 sit-ups made tougher by holding weights.
He looks remarkably fit for a guy who turned 61 in June, but that’s no surprise, considering his lifelong athletic prowess.
Once a three-sport star in high school, Alleva is now an avid golfer. He’s been a seriously competitive tennis player and cyclist, too.
“The thing I like about golf is, every other sport you need other people to play with,” says Alleva, now in his sixth year at LSU. “In golf, you play against yourself and the golf course.”
He appreciates these quiet moments on the course, especially during the summer, before the LSU football frenzy invades all of Baton Rouge in August.
“I see it every day,” he says knowingly.
But that makes this month special.
“I get excited for the start of every year,” Alleva says. “It’s almost like a rebirth every year. That’s one thing nice about college sports. There are a whole lot of freshmen coming in, there’s new energy, and there’s always excitement around the start of a year. It’s fun and gets my juices flowing.”
The Allevas have three married children, all of whom graduated from Duke University. Their oldest son J.D. lives in Charlotte and works for the Houston Astros. Jeff is in finance in New York, and daughter Jenny lives in Nashville. She made them grandparents with her daughter, Harper.
Alleva never could have imagined 40 years ago that he’d one day be a grandfather in Baton Rouge.
His first car was a hand-me-down 1966 Ford Galaxy. Growing up in Rockland County, suburban New York City, although a Yankees fan his favorite baseball player was Willie Mays. And, despite being a Giants fan, his favorite football player was Jets quarterback Joe Namath.
Alleva played football, basketball and baseball at Suffern High School, where Annie Visconte was a cheerleader.
“The funny thing is, back in the day, his nickname was Broadway Joe and his number was 12,” Annie says as Joe cringes at the Namath references.
Alleva chose Lehigh University, a small private college outside Philadelphia, where he played quarterback—he was team captain in 1974—and a couple of years of baseball.
“He was a natural athlete and good at whatever he did,” Annie says. “Then, after we got married, he started playing tennis. He’d win the tournament! Then he took up golf and won.”
After college, Alleva got a tryout with the Jets, but he ended up back at Lehigh as a graduate assistant coach working on his MBA.
“I wanted to be a hospital administrator,” he recalls.
His first job was as a chemical salesman. After two months, he says, he realized sales was not for him. So he went to Duke. He was making $9,000 a year at various business jobs at the university. Four years later, in 1980—right around the time Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski—Alleva moved across campus as the business manager of athletics for A.D. Tom Butters, who he replaced in 1998.
Duke had tremendous success during his time there, especially in both men’s and women’s basketball and golf. Duke’s newfound football success has occurred since he left. But his experiences as a family man and all those years at Duke prepared him for the undertaking at LSU, where every move is in the spotlight.
“I have a philosophy that I like to hire good people and let them do good jobs,” he says. “My job is to help them do their jobs. So whether it’s the football coach, or whether it’s the volleyball coach, if they need something—come and see me, and I’ll try to help you. Most of my conversations with [LSU head football Coach] Les [Miles] are, What can I do to help you?’ That’s most of my conversations with most of my coaches.”
Alleva has hired a handful of coaches at LSU, most notably women’s basketball Coach Nikki Caldwell, men’s basketball coaches Trent Johnson and Johnny Jones, and a few Olympic sports coaches. How he does it is worth noting.
“Of course I like to get recommendations and things like that, but hiring a coach, at the end of the day, one of the main criteria I look at is [whether I] would want my kid to play for that person. And if that person came into my house recruiting my kid, could they recruit my kid? Of course you look at experience, and you look at their records, but at the end of the day my gut check is would I want my kid to play for that person.”
The word “fit” always comes up when hiring.
“Here you have to have the ability to reach out to the public. Be out there and shake hands and talk to people. I think that’s very important. The culture here is very friendly, and you need to be like that.”
Alleva himself is actually a fairly private person. He does all the A.D. schmoozing he has to, but he likes to stay out of the limelight. Like earlier this summer, when a rumor floated that he was a candidate to become A.D. at Penn State.
“That was ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head. Three years ago Tennessee made a real run at him. But, obviously, he stayed.
In college sports, things can always change in a hurry, but it’s not likely that Alleva is going anywhere soon.
“I like to think I’m accessible,” he says, and then laughs.
“The culture here is great. The people are friendly, and I like it.”
The late Joe Dean, former LSU A.D., said it best: The key to being a good athletic director is having a good football team. Alleva understands that. He continues to reap football success from the coach he inherited at LSU, Les Miles.
“He’s won over 80% of his games,” Alleva says. “It’s hard to argue with the results that he’s come up with.”
For that matter, before he left his athletic director post at Duke—once a football wasteland—Alleva hired David Cutcliffe. That school has since had its best gridiron success in its history.
While LSU expects to compete at the highest levels in all sports, the main focus is always on the big three.
Baseball at LSU appears to be on autopilot, thanks largely to Alleva’s predecessor, the legendary Skip Bertman. He not only took the program to five NCAA titles, Bertman also hired the highly successful Coach Paul Mainieri, and in his last big accomplishment as A.D., got the building of the new Alex Box Stadium into its final stages.
But the LSU men’s basketball program has been left wanting over the past decade. Alleva’s first hire was Trent Johnson, who had mixed results but never connected with the fan base. When Johnson left, Alleva brought in former LSU player and assistant Johnny Jones, who in his first two years back in Baton Rouge has seen excitement and interest but not enough victories.
“I think we’re really close,” Alleva says. “I was a little disappointed with this year. If we had won only two or three more games we would have been in the NCAA tournament, and I think we could have done some damage in the tournament.”
LSU has young stars, and recruiting has gone well. There’s no doubt that it’s important for LSU to get back to the “Big Dance.”
“It’s very important,” Alleva says. “It’s very important to me that we win in everything. I want to win in tennis, in golf—but for me, basketball is really important.”
Time for a quick historical perspective: Duke’s is regarded as one of the top basketball programs in the history of the college game. For that matter, during his 32 total years at Duke, Alleva’s everyday racquetball partner was basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.
“Basketball is the one area that we can make more money that we’re not making money,” Alleva admits. “We’re pretty much maxed out in baseball, we’re pretty much maxed out in football. We’ve sold all the tickets. But basketball, we’re not close to maxed out. We have a lot of tickets to sell and a lot of room to grow.”
One more point of historical perspective on Duke, where Alleva served for a decade before arriving at LSU in 2008. That stretch leading Blue Devils athletics included the infamous 2006 lacrosse disaster, which, if you’re not familiar, involved rape allegations, the coach being fired and an avalanche of awful national publicity for the university.
“It was a terrible thing for Duke,” Alleva says.
The incident and its aftermath came up a couple of times during the interviews for this story.
“To be honest with you, I haven’t thought about lacrosse a whole lot,” Alleva says. “I kind of put it out of my mind. Living through that was really hard. It was a really hard time. But in my career, it was a great learning experience. It really was. It made me better going through that. It really did.”
The rape allegations were later proved false in court, but the damage from the investigation—which unearthed some ugly activities and emails from the team—was done. There are some who still think poorly of Alleva for this dark period at Duke.
“The thing I’m most proud of is [that] I was the only person on campus who never got sued,” Alleva says quietly. “Everyone at the university got sued. Everybody. I said privately—we had meetings about it all the time—that they’re innocent until proven guilty. I said, You’ve got to let this play out. Don’t overreact.’ But it was like talking to the wall. They weren’t listening to me.”
At LSU, Alleva’s official title is Vice Chancellor and Director of Athletics. While he has the rare combination job of working on the university’s academic side and in sports, it’s his role running the massive Athletics Department that puts him in the spotlight. Most of his focus is on the football team and the huge structure in which it plays, the Louisiana icon of icons known as Tiger Stadium.
“Around $107 million.” This is Alleva’s estimate of the LSU athletics budget for 2014-15. And yet funding is always a chief concern. Fortunately, the university is a member of the powerful Southeastern Conference. The SEC launches a new TV network this month that should provide LSU with a boost.
“The more money we can make, the less burden we have to put on our fans through ticket prices,” Alleva says.
While the average fan seems to think that LSU raises ticket prices all the time, when Alleva did so last year, it was actually the first such increase since his predecessor, Skip Bertman, instituted the tradition fund.
“I don’t want to raise ticket prices. I don’t ever want to raise ticket prices, but it’s business. And for us to keep paying the bills and keep competing, we have to sometimes raise the ticket prices,” Alleva explains matter-of-factly.
“It’s just part of the business.”
Alleva agrees the salaries of college football coaches, for example, are obscene. His own coach, Les Miles, makes nearly $5 million a year.
“But it’s the law of supply and demand,” he says. “Everyone is afraid of losing, so they’re willing to pay large amounts of money to try to avoid losing. That’s what it’s all about.
“It’s not that everyone wants to win, but it’s the fear of losing. What’s the cost of losing? What’s the cost of nobody being in your stadium? That’s why people pay the money, and that’s why good coaches are making a lot of money.”
It’s safe to say no one rooting for the purple and gold, ticket buyers or not, wants LSU to ever lose again like it did during a stretch from 1989 to 1999 when it had eight losing seasons in 11 years. Fans want to see the kind of success LSU has had more recently, winning the 2003 and 2007 BCS titles and playing in the 2011 national championship bowl game.
“We’ve won so much that expectations are very high,” Alleva says. “They’re very, very high. It’s like expectations at Duke in basketball.”
Sure, he gets complaints about the football team’s performance and coaching, but it’s off-the-field problems that Alleva says he confronts the most: LSU football game-day parking and traffic.
“We’re working hard with the city police and all the police to make it better, and they’ve been very cooperative. It’s hard, though. There are only so many roads around LSU.”
And they all, it seems, lead to Tiger Stadium, which is in the final phases of a massive project that has closed in the south end of the building, adding more suites and a few thousand additional seats.
The cost of the project, bankrolled by the fundraising arm of his department, the Tiger Athletic Foundation, is $87 million.
All 24 new suites “were sold before we ever broke ground,” he says.
At a capacity of 102,321, Tiger Stadium is now the seventh largest college stadium in the nation.
“It will be at capacity that is sufficient, very sufficient, for the demand at LSU,” Alleva says. “There may come a time when we have to reduce the capacity. And what I mean by that is, instead of having a bench seat that’s only 20 inches wide, you may have to put in seats that are 24 inches wide and take away seats to make the new ones more comfortable. In the future it’s a possibility. I’m not saying we’re going to do that, but that we may have to. You have to make sure the fans keep coming to the games and make it more comfortable.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do more things to the stadium as far as rest rooms and concession stands and all those things, but for the capacity of the stadium, I can’t see it getting any larger.”
But it will always look good, which is important to Alleva.
For example, he likes to garden and jokes that he plants perennials so he doesn’t have to do it every year. He also likes trimming the bushes. And mowing the lawn?
“I have a 15-year-old push mower,” he says proudly. “Everyone in my neighborhood either has a lawn service or a tractor. I take great pride in mowing my own grass.”
No wonder Tiger Stadium looks better than ever, from Alleva’s window project to the signage on the west side.
“I like things to look good, and when you walk around the stadium, it’s really going to look good,” he says.
“I’m really proud of what we’re doing. When I took over the job six years ago, the stadium was in terrible need of repair. We fixed up the outside, and it really looks nice, and the south end zone will really be spectacular. It will be representative of what LSU should have, and that’s a first-class facility.”
So when the current project is finished, is that the last of major construction on Tiger Stadium?
Alleva laughs heartily and says, “In my tenure it is.”
