Duquesne Athletic Director Dave Harper Leaving for Baylor's Big 12 Operation

Dave Harper spent more than a decade reshaping Duquesne athletics from the ground up, overseeing a $45 million arena, an Atlantic 10 tournament championship, and the Dukes' first NCAA tournament appearance in decades. Now Baylor wants those skills applied to an entirely different scale of problem.

Harper announced March 31 that he will leave Duquesne to become executive senior associate athletic director at Baylor, a Big 12 program where he will be charged with revenue generation and strategic resource allocation. The transition takes effect in May.

The hire lands Harper inside one of college athletics' most financially demanding environments. Big 12 athletic departments averaged $123 million in annual operating expenses in 2024, a figure that has already climbed roughly 23 percent over two years. The House v. NCAA settlement, which took effect July 1, 2025, and requires schools to share revenue directly with athletes, is pushing those costs even higher, adding an estimated $30 million in new obligations annually for most Power Five members. Managing that landscape requires administrators who have actually built something from limited resources, not just inherited a system.

That is precisely the profile Harper brings. The UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse, which opened in January 2021, stands as the clearest illustration of his operational credibility: a $45 million facility project executed at a mid-major program in Pittsburgh, funded through fundraising and commercial partnerships while the department simultaneously competed for recruits in the Atlantic 10. Baylor is betting that experience translates directly into the naming rights negotiations, premium seating expansions, and corporate sponsorship structures that now define Power Five revenue strategy.

The move is part of a recognizable pattern in the post-NIL, transfer-portal era. As Power Five programs confront the complexity of direct athlete pay, roster management under new limits, and escalating compliance requirements, they are increasingly recruiting executives who built functional athletic departments under real financial constraints. Mid-major administrators who navigated those pressures without the safety net of a nine-figure media rights deal have become a sought-after commodity.

The cost falls on programs like Duquesne. The Atlantic 10 is already grappling with how a basketball-centric conference competes for talent in a revenue-sharing environment where Power Five schools can deploy vastly more capital toward NIL and facilities. Losing an experienced AD to a Big 12 program accelerates the problem: the institutional knowledge Harper accumulated, from facility development to donor cultivation to compliance infrastructure, now sits in Waco rather than Pittsburgh.

Duquesne moved quickly to limit the disruption, promoting senior associate athletic director John Henderson to the interim AD role while a national search for Harper's permanent successor gets underway. University officials acknowledged Harper's leadership in a formal statement. Henderson, elevated from within the department Harper built, now inherits both the asset of that foundation and the challenge of sustaining it through one of the most turbulent stretches in college athletics history.