Kansas plans on hiring Sam Strantz, senior team counsel for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, as the Jayhawks athletic department’s new executive director of front office strategy and operations, ESPN reported Friday.
A source close to the situation told The Star that Strantz indeed appears to be the choice to fill a newly created position. The duties of the position were described by athletic director Travis Goff in an article published Thursday by The Star.
KU as of Friday evening had not responded to a request for comment on the report of Strantz’s hire. But Goff described duties of the person who would fill the new position earlier this week in an interview with The Star.
“We are hiring what I describe in some regard as a centralized GM for our department that will work with our top revenue shared programs,” Goff said. “They will make sure central administration, starting with me, is highly educated and impactful as possible in making sure our programs are investing in the right fashion.
“They’ll help measure what does success look like and ROI. They will be a great resource for our top-line rev-share programs. It will start under the premise of football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and then we have four other programs that have rev-share and NIL allocation.”
Goff noted that Kansas had a large pool of candidates for the position, including several individuals from pro sports franchises. The KU AD said a search firm helped locate candidates.
Strantz, according to his LinkedIn account, is a sports business attorney who has served as the Rockets’ senior team counsel since July 2024. According to his account bio, his duties have been to “advise the Houston Rockets at the intersection of basketball operations and legal strategy, supporting front-office decision-making, roster construction, transaction execution, and organizational execution.”
Strantz’s account adds that he “served as part of the (Rockets’) front office through a full rebuild to back-to-back 52-win seasons — contributing to transactions including the drafting of a two-time All-Star and the acquisition of Kevin Durant.” The page also notes that he “serves as a legal and strategic advisor to senior leadership, including the president, general manager, general counsel, and coaching and basketball operations staff.”
Strantz’s duties with the Rockets have been many, including drafting and negotiating “NBA uniform player contracts across rookies, veterans, two-way players, 10-days, partial guarantees, injury exceptions, extensions, buyouts, and separation agreements.”
He said on the LinkedIn that he also has translated “CBA rules, player contract structures, compensation constraints, league requirements, and roster objectives into front-office guidance on personnel strategy, transaction timing, and roster flexibility.”
His LinkedIn account mentions “managing basketball operations vendor relationships across analytics, player development, wearables, statistical systems, scouting tools, and shot-tracking technologies.”
Strantz graduated from the University of Memphis magna cum laude in 2012. He graduated cum laude from University of Tennessee College of Law in 2015.
His prior experience includes being an associate at Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz in Memphis, where he focused on financial services/securities litigation, business disputes, intellectual property, branding/false advertising and sports/entertainment work (including player/endorsement/sponsorship agreements, athlete representation issues and NCAA eligibility matters).
He has written on such topics as NCAA name/image/likeness (NIL) developments and NBA “supermax” contract issues.
Goff said a goal of this hiring “is that our administration ends up being an administration that thinks and acts with a front-office mentality.
“The vast majority haven’t come from the background, so let’s bring somebody in here who can help create accountability, starting with me and the administration, and then extrapolate value and impact to the programs from there.”
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Gary Bedore covers KU basketball for The Kansas City Star. He has written about the Jayhawks since 1978 — during the Ted Owens, Larry Brown, Roy Williams and Bill Self eras. He has won the Kansas Sportswriter of the Year award and KPA writing awards.