Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame 2024: Tom Burnett’s leadership skills were on display quite early

Editor’s note: This is the 10th in a series of stories on the 2024 inductees into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. Induction festivities are June 20-22 in Natchitoches.

There are several people to blame for the 2024 Dave Dixon Louisiana Sports Leadership Award being presented to former Southland Conference commissioner — not the least of which is Tom Burnett.

More on that later.

The reason a once unlikely Dixon/Burnett pairing has come to this starts with Keith Prince, the sports information director at Louisiana Tech from 1969-93.

Prince saw in the mid-1980s a kid from West Monroe by way of Houston show up “when he was still searching for something,” Prince said, “maybe just something to care about … or even a reason to be in school.”

Prince allowed him to hang around and soon Burnett was enjoying his new responsibilities, looking for more and even taking ownership of the job — a full-time assistant on a student assistant’s pay.

After graduation, Burnett dipped his toe into the sports writing waters in Monroe, felt a chill and retreated back to the safety of Ruston.

There, he pestered Prince for more loose change so he could hang around the SID office a bit longer. It may have ended there, with Burnett replacing a retiring Prince in 1993, if something else did not appear.

Enter the new American South Conference and commissioner Craig Thompson, who offered Burnett a job to manage communications and media services from the New Orleans-based office.

Over time, Burnett oversaw staff, formatted league schedules, managed championship events, dealt with coaching issues, helped birth the New Orleans Bowl and hosted NCAA tournament basketball at the Superdome until, Burnett confessed, “I guess I became an administrator.”

“During those early days, I saw his passion for doing things the right way,” said Dan McDonald, the sports information director at then-USL when Burnett was just getting his young administrative feet wet. “He was old school like me, and we did a lot of things at conference championship events that were special at the time — things that are taken for granted these days.”

Like himself, McDonald noted that Burnett was dedicated to making events special for athletes and coaches. They also appreciated and understood the job the media performed and its importance at the time to making those events successful.

Burnett later moved on to the Sun Belt Conference as assistant commissioner. Then in 2002, at 38 years of age, he was named commissioner of the Southland Conference.

With the job came an air of respect for a young man who was proving himself as a leader in an ego-heavy business.

Herb Vincent, associate commissioner for communications for the Southeastern Conference since 2013, said Burnett was “mostly a great friend and a constant presence for many like me who have benefitted from his years of insight, experience and humor.”

Many people took notice of Burnett’s work over the years.

“Tom carried the weight of being a leader and its responsibility — which directly impacted as many as 12 universities and thousands of student-athletes — with a steady, caring and passionate approach for over 20 years,” former Northwestern State athletic director Greg Burke said.

Burnett served on various NCAA committees during his two-decade tenure with the Southland, which ended with his retirement after becoming the first person from an FCS school to chair the Division I men’s basketball committee in the 2021-22 season.

In 2003, he was named to the Division I Committee on Academic Performance shortly after the NCAA ramped up scholastic standards and created the Academic Performance Rate (APR).

Burnett found himself surrounded by reps from the Ivy League, Big Ten, Pac-10, ACC and SEC — none of which had APR problems like the Southland did at the time.

Faced with significant penalties for failure to comply, the conference responded after Burnett convinced the presidents of just how real the problem had become. That triggered an improvement in the league’s APR scores.

Sooner rather than later, the Southland had a better collective APR score in men’s basketball than the ACC.

When Burnett was a rookie commissioner, precious few Southland contests were televised. The league semi-invented its own in-house TV network of weekly football games and men’s and women’s basketball doubleheaders.

The Southland Conference Television Network, an old-school “over-the-air” operation, grew into close to three dozen affiliates across the South and Southwest before an enhanced ESPN agreement and an expansion into volleyball, softball and baseball telecasts.

Eventually, Southland schools were producing hundreds of digital telecasts combined (like most leagues do now), which allowed for negotiation of the Southland’s multimillion-dollar agreement in 2020.

In 2007, Burnett approached the Big 12 about combining their football officiating programs, something that was being done between leagues in other sports but not football.

The Southland also took ownership of the FCS championship game under Burnett’s guidance in 2010. The game now has an economic impact of $16 million a year.

“I’ve never been surprised by Tom’s career success,” Prince said. “He’s a natural leader, and his vision for things that are needed and will work has always been exceptional.”