After 25 years at Washington, Jen Cohen decided USC was a better fit

“There’s probably nowhere else in America that we can develop into our best selves more so than USC,” Cohen said.

Photo courtesy of UW Athletics.

Jen Cohen once told me that as a senior at Curtis High School, she applied to three colleges: Arizona State, San Diego State and the University of Washington. You probably know by now that Cohen grew up attending UW football games with her father, and that she idolized coach Don James.

She wanted to be a Husky.

Instead, she was waitlisted.

“Heartbroken,” was how she put it.

UW eventually offered admission, she said, but Cohen had already chosen to attend San Diego State.

“I was a good student,” Cohen told me in 2016, not long after she was hired as UW’s athletic director. “But I’m more of a street-smart girl than I probably am anything else.”

I wonder if she thought about any of this on Monday. This time, it was Cohen passing on UW, departing the school after seven years as AD — and 25, total, as a UW employee — for the same job at USC.

Why now? My guess is Cohen couldn’t pass up the opportunity to helm one of the nation’s truly elite athletic departments, and probably feels, too, as if she did what she could to help secure UW’s future. She ripped off the Jimmy Lake band-aid and hired a football coach who won 11 games in his first season. The Huskies are a preseason top-10 team in 2023. UW president Ana Mari Cauce had to sign off on the Big Ten decision, yes, but you can be sure Cohen went to great lengths to help her boss arrive at the proper conclusion, lending her expertise within the landscape — and, frankly, the cutthroat sensibility needed to advocate for such a leap — to ensure the Huskies weren’t left behind.

Her tenure had its rocky moments. In her first year as AD, Cohen made the difficult decision to fire longtime men’s basketball coach Lorenzo Romar, replacing him with Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins. At first, it appeared a brilliant move; Hopkins won conference Coach of the Year honors in his first two seasons, guiding UW to the NCAA Tournament in 2018-19. Cohen rewarded him with a contract extension and raise. But the Huskies soon regressed, and that new contract — fully guaranteed — might be the only reason Hopkins is still at UW.

And while Cohen should be lauded for moving swiftly to correct course on Lake, it’s still true that his buyout — totaling $9.9 million, owed in monthly installments through January 2025 — is among the primary factors dragging down UW’s athletics budget. 

On the whole, though, Cohen was a positive force at a school that may well have come to take her for granted. She cultivated strong relationships with top donors and played a crucial role in raising funds for the Husky Stadium renovation. She missed on Lake, but pulled off the steal of the 2021 coaching carousel by hiring DeBoer from Fresno State. When UW hired Chris Petersen, Cohen was the only person to accompany former AD Scott Woodward to meet with the coach in Boise, and has enjoyed a close relationship with Petersen ever since. She inherited a massive budget deficit in 2016 and helped correct it ahead of schedule. She also was selected earlier this year to serve on the College Football Playoff selection committee. 

Cohen’s first women’s basketball hire, Jody Wynn, proved a total flop, but, as with Lake, Cohen corrected course with the hire of Tina Langley, who had the team in the WNIT semifinals in her second season. Last year, Cohen replaced baseball coach Lindsay Meggs with Jason Kelly, who led the Huskies to the postseason in Year 1. She also hired UW’s track-and-field coaches, Maurica and Andy Powell, away from rival Oregon in 2018. 

Yet as the years went on, I became more convinced Cohen would not finish her professional career at UW. I’m not sure I can point to anything specific that led me to this belief, aside from observing that her competitive nature always appeared to outpace that of the broader university culture.

Still, I’d have wagered a large sum that her next venture would be, say, in the consulting realm, rather than another AD job. But one could argue her personality is better aligned with expectations and campus priorities at USC than at Washington, no matter her long-cultivated UW fandom.

Cohen prides herself on being a values-driven leader. She wants to do things the right way. She wants to run a compliant department. She’s friendly and charismatic and truly cares about serving students. But she also wants to win, badly, and I’m not surprised that anyone who spent 25 years at UW might wonder what it would be like to work at a school that doesn’t bat an eye at spending whatever it takes to hire the very best people, and prioritizes football to the greatest degree possible.

Understand: UW has resources. Most of its Power 5 peers would love to spend at the level Washington can. It’s a big reason why I think this will be an attractive opening. It’s just that creativity is sometimes required to cover expenses in a way that USC likely doesn’t experience. 

Need to buy out the football coach? You can, of course, but you might have to restructure stadium debt to make the numbers work.

Need to pay your football staff an additional $3 million after smashing success in their debut season? You find a way to do it, of course, but not without significant discussion about what it means for the budget, or wondering how it might play with faculty.

Need to pay $6 million to fire the men’s basketball coach? Ha! No.

Plus, USC will enter the Big Ten next summer with a full share of the league’s media-rights deal. UW will be cut in at roughly half. 

“There’s probably nowhere else in America that we can develop into our best selves more so than USC,” Cohen said at her Monday press conference.

Of course, I’m speculating to suggest that department finances were at the heart of Cohen’s decision. She is leaving for one of the top AD jobs in college sports, and USC is a national brand, and, as Cohen said: “Very few schools can say what (USC) can say with confidence, which is, we can win a national championship in all 21 of our sports — and at the same time, we can graduate our student-athletes with transferable skills that better prepares them for life after college.

“And we can do all of that because of all of you — because of the USC family, because of the resources and the support and the passion that’s here, and I cannot wait to tap into that.”

There likely are personal considerations, too. Cohen’s oldest son plays golf at Spokane Community College. She just dropped off her youngest, Dylan, at the University of Montana, where he’ll play offensive line. She was born in Arcadia, Calif. Her family moved to Tacoma when she was in fifth grade, but she did attend San Diego State, and once told me she considered San Diego her “second home.” Cohen has strong roots in Seattle, no doubt, but there is plenty to suggest she would find Southern California appealing.

Cauce named Erin O’Connell, a deputy athletic director and UW’s senior woman administrator, as interim AD. Another name to watch is Andy Fee, currently a deputy athletic director and the chief of staff, who came to UW in August 2022 after five years as the AD at Long Beach State. It remains to be seen whether Cohen will bring to USC any members of UW’s administrative staff. 

I expect UW to hire a search firm and take a national scope. If the school does make an external hire, it would be its first since Todd Turner in 2004. It sort of feels like time to branch out, doesn’t it? The Huskies are headed to the Big Ten. Their chief rivals in that conference — USC and Oregon — will both have respected ADs with national clout. But just as USC will always be in position to poach UW’s AD, the Huskies have plenty to sell to potential candidates who don’t currently work for a Big Ten-bound school located in a major media market with a top-10 football program.

Challenges lie ahead. The department is facing a budget deficit and will spend the next year navigating its transition to a new conference. Increased debt service is looming. Depending on how the 2023-24 season plays out, any new hire might soon have to rule on Hopkins’ future. And if the Huskies have designs on keeping DeBoer long-term, they’d best prioritize hiring an AD with whom the coach can quickly develop a strong relationship.

Cohen always wanted to be a Husky. She got her wish, eventually trading her childhood seats in Section 19 for the athletic director’s suite. Even then, she paced the sidelines like a nervous parent, screamed at the officials, celebrated like crazy after big victories and told anyone who would listen that Jake Browning didn’t get nearly enough credit.

This week, though, she made the same decision the UW admissions office made some 36 years ago: that despite her Husky upbringing, Jen Cohen and her street smarts belong somewhere else.

— Christian Caple, On Montlake