Following a memorable year, the Texas A&M athletic program finished a record-high 6th place in the Division I Learfield Sports Director’s Cup standings. It’s the third time that the program under Athletic Director Bill Byrne has broken the school record since he arrived at A&M in December 2002.
“That was an accomplishment,” Byrne said. “Our coaches, student-athletes, support staff and our donors have all done a remarkable job. It’s not just one team, coach or group of athletes that does that. It’s a body of work that is done by our entire program. I think it shows a total commitment across the board and that’s not easily done.”
The Director’s Cup standings are determined by point values awarded to each university for their success in up to 10 male and 10 female sports. Driven by two national championships and eight national top-10 finishes, the Aggies concluded the 2009-10 athletic year with a school-record 1070.75 points and earned their first finish in the top 10.
“To get to be in the top 10 is a real accomplishment and our goal is to stay here” Byrne said. “We want to consistently be a top-10 program in the nation. For a program the size of Texas A&M, doing that is going to be a real accomplishment for us.”
The feat is magnified by the drastic improvement that A&M’s athletic program has undergone under Byrne. In 2001-02, the year before his arrival, A&M finished 37th in the Director’s Cup standings and had never finished higher that 20th. The Aggies now have four straight top-20 finishes in the standings and have claimed five national championships in the past two years after earning only three in the previous 69 years.
“At the national directors’ meetings is when that was announced and I had so many of my colleagues come up and congratulate us,” Byrne said. “They know where we were seven years ago and they know how far we’ve come in that length of time.”
One of the greatest turnarounds in A&M sports during the Byrne era has been that of women’s sports. With only five regular-season conference championships before 2003, Byrne has led the Aggie women’s teams to 20 Big 12 regular-season championships since arriving in College Station. This athletic year, the women accounted for 53 percent of A&M’s points in the Director’s Cup.
For the 16th consecutive year, Stanford was crowned Director’s Cup champions. Despite the program’s tremendous success, Stanford selects their top 20 finishes out of their 28 NCAA-recognized sports. Texas A&M, which only supports 20 athletic programs, is further hampered by the NCAA’s refusal to recognize equestrian. Not only have the Aggies not been awarded for equestrian’s seven national championships in eight years, but A&M is only allowed to enter results for 19 sports into the Director’s Cup.
“I congratulate Stanford for doing an excellent job but the top programs, when you look at them, have many more sports than we do,” Byrne said. “We need to get equestrian to be our 20th. If they did that, we’d have another national championship feather in our hat.”
After turning the program around faster and stronger than most predicted, Byrne is still shooting for larger heights.
“I’m excited about our future here,” Byrne said. “That’s one of the reasons I came here. I thought we were under-achieving and I thought we could do better. This shows that we can. I’m the eternal optimist. I think we’re going to continue to get better. I like what we’re building here. We’re getting to the point at A&M where we’re reloading every year.”
Despite all of the talk about Texas and Nebraska in the conference realignment debate, both schools finished behind A&M and Oklahoma. The Sooners finished 12th in the standings, followed by the Longhorns in 15th and the Cornhuskers in 17th. After leading the Big 12 in the standings for eight consecutive years, the University of Texas at Austin failed to finish in the top 10 for the first time since 2000-01.