What was the story of how that relationship and that donor cultivation came together? And maybe what are some lessons for other administrators or advancement officers in this era of college athletics that they can learn from the way that you and your team stewarded that relationship and this opportunity? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'll describe it this way.

Forever, one of the most fulfilling, meaningful things for me in my time here, time thus far and however long it continues, has been and will be my relationship with Mr. Booth.

You want to talk about like notion of mentorship.

Mentorship can come from a host of different directions.

He's been a remarkable mentor for me and so many others, but for me, undoubtedly.

And, you know, it kind of started, I'd say it this way, you know, a young, youngish, ambitious, new athletic director who thought he knew fundraising really well and I jumped the gun with Mr. Booth.

What's the discipline required to run a planned deficit? And how do you avoid that deficit becoming permanent? Right.

the

scenes that we're not seeing? Yeah, I think – I mean, a couple things, Saran.

One is I think the conferences are taking a little bit more ownership.

We saw that in the SEC-LSU situation.

The SEC had to take strong action.

They did so.

Thus far it looks successful.

What does that mean for Kansas basketball? Are you prepared? Do you think this is the last year? And how do you work that with Bill moving forward since he did seem to take a moment to see what his future would be?

Can you just give us a sense here of of this and how it's really interesting to see all of college athletics sort of figure out how to organize their front offices, quote unquote.

Yeah.

I mean, it's still a new element in our space.

And I think it's important to have the awareness and humility that if you haven't come from that background, which the vast majority of us haven't, of course, you really want to assess what could it even look like? What would your place need? How would you put some staffing and support around it? Where does it sit? Where does it you know report to all those things so you know we took this last year and of a lot of learning in the new house settlement environment and and um and the whole notion of player acquisition player retention and we said this is what we want it to look like at kansas and you know gm's just a phrase that gets kind of usually loosely i think overused in our case this role is to be kind of the central hub of front office mentality, a front office approach to how we mobilize support for our programs, how we allocate resources to programs for roster acquisition and retention.

And it's going to report to the AD.

It'll sit centrally in the department.

And it'll really be a great asset, we think, for obviously football, men's basketball, basketball.

Just what led to that opportunity and what makes it so attractive and beneficial for KU?