EAST LANSING — Michigan State believes it can’t compete in an increasingly expensive college sports landscape without third-party entity Spartan Ventures generating higher revenues. After losing three key leaders within three months of its July 1 launch, it just filled a key position.

Michigan State is hiring former Northwestern athletic director Mike Polisky to be its new deputy athletic director and CEO of Spartan Ventures, the university announced Friday, Oct. 23.

“This is a critical time for our department, and Mike’s leadership will be vital to our championship aspirations,” MSU athletic director Dan Bartholomae said in a statement. “At every stop of his professional journey, both inside and outside college athletics, his career has been defined by innovation, revenue generation, and brand growth, resulting in a powerful connection between the team and the community. He will be a strong addition to our team as we define our vision for the future of Michigan State Athletics.”

Polisky is a Chicago native and Iowa graduate who has worked as the president of the Association of Pickleball Professionals since 2022 and as the executive vice president of Intersport since 2021. He was Northwestern’s executive athletic director for external affairs from 2010 to 2021, and before that worked for various minor-league teams in Chicago, including the Chicago Wolves AHL hockey team and Chicago Rush, an Arena Football League team.

Polisky replaces predecessor Jon Palumbo, former athletic director J Batt’s right-hand man who followed Batt to Kentucky when he didn’t get the job as MSU’s athletic director. MSU hired Bartholomae away from Western Michigan in August following Batt’s departure amid leadership uncertainty over the summer.

Spartan Ventures is a third-party entity made up of for-profit Spartan Media Ventures LLC and non-profit Spartan Athletic Foundation. Its intent is to concentrate MSU’s athletics funds to compete in a college sports world in which NIL payments, TV deals and revenue share have made dramatic changes to the business model in the past five years.

“And if we don’t do that, any institution that’s not doing that and trying to get creative around that, is going to struggle in this environment that we’re living in right now,” Guskiewicz told The Detroit News earlier this week in an exclusive interview.

Polisky’s Northwestern tenure came to abrupt, controversial end

Suffice it to say that Michigan State head football coach Pat Fitzgerald has some gripes with the leadership of his alma mater Northwestern, particularly the leaders who fired him amid a graphic sexual hazing scandal in July 2023. He wound up settling a lawsuit for wrongful termination in August 2025 that he said made him feel “vindicated,” and he took the head-coaching job at Michigan State four months later.

Polisky follows Fitzgerald to Michigan State with his own baggage. Just nine days after he was promoted to be Northwestern athletic director in May 2021, he stepped down amid controversy. A federal lawsuit filed by former cheerleader Hayden Richardson alleged that Polisky and other Northwestern officials ignored reports of groping and sexual harassment from Northwestern cheerleaders. That lawsuit was dropped in August 2024 with no settlement paid. Meanwhile, Polisky received $1.2 million in severance from Northwestern.

Spartan Ventures is a separate, third-party entity from the university, though it does operate on an affiliation agreement, and key MSU officials sit on its seven-member board including Guskiewicz, Bartholomae and Board of Trustees chair Brianna Scott.

Michigan State hasn’t shown hesitation to hire key pieces of its athletic department with past controversies, including hiring Fitzgerald as its football coach last winter. At the time, sexual misconduct advocates raised concerns with the hire.

Outside the circumstances of his departure, Polisky was part of a successful run at Northwestern, particularly for Fitzgerald’s football program. The coach went 110–101 record overall, 65–76 in Big Ten play over 17 years with two Big Ten West titles, 10 bowl games and an AP poll high of No. 10 in 2020. All that at a school with steeper admissions standards and smaller athletics resources than most of its Big Ten peers.

Part of what made Northwestern click during Fitzgerald’s tenure, he says, was vertical alignment — a unity of ideas and goals from the president to the athletic director to the football coach and beyond. Polisky was a key piece of that leadership group. His branding campaign cast Northwestern as “Chicago’s Big Ten school” and his efforts doubled season tickets for Northwestern football.

In recent weeks, Fitzgerald touted the alignment at Michigan State, including new AD Bartholomae.

“When the Board, and the president and the athletic director and the football coach are aligned, great things and special things can happen,” Fitzgerald said Oct. 12. “We had that for a long time (at Northwestern), which I’m very thankful for, and I feel those same things here now.”

Stability a necessity for Spartan Ventures CEO

Spartan Ventures became the subject of controversy over the past year when certain members of MSU’s Board of Trustees — Mike Balow, Dennis Denno and Rema Vassar — raised transparency and oversight concerns because they weren’t allowed to view certain documents without signing a non-disclosure agreement. That was the root cause of discontent between Guskiewicz and the Board that almost led to his departure for Clemson in May before he changed his mind in July. In that span, Batt left for a big pay raise at Kentucky and two officials — Spartan Ventures CEO Palumbo and Spartan Athletic Foundation president Tim House — also left MSU by mid-September.

Polisky fills the most pressing of the remaining open roles as Spartan Ventures CEO. He will sit on a Spartan Ventures Board of Directors that also includes Guskiewicz, Bartholomae and Scott, as well as donor Aaron Zeigler, April Clobes, Rick Lasch and chair Phil Hickey.

“I think all seven of us are connected to MSU and to Spartan athletics in a unique way and we can all bring something different to the table through our own unique lens,” Guskiewicz told The News, before Polisky’s hiring was announced.

“Mike Polisky is the right choice to guide Spartan Ventures during this formational stage of the organization,” Hickey said in a statement. “Among his diverse set of experiences, one commonality has been his effectiveness at driving and maximizing revenue. The Board looks forward to working with him on the important work ahead in support of Michigan State Athletics and Spartan student-athletes.”

The purpose of the entire third-party Spartan Ventures entity is to maximize revenues for the athletic department, partly through donations and partly through investments. That includes $100 million of its seed money that came from megadonors Greg and Dawn Williams, in December 2025 — less than a week after Fitzgerald’s hire. Michigan State also announced a $1 billion fundraising campaign, FOR SPARTA, last year. In the past month, it announced donations of $10 million from Michigan car dealership magnates Joe and Julie Serra, as well as Zeigler. Spartan Ventures is also cutting branding deals, like the MSUFCU jersey patch deal that nets the school in the range of $4 million per year the next 10 years.

“The Spartan Ventures brand is not front and center. The average fan probably doesn’t know that there’s been much of a change,” Guskiewicz told The News. “I think going to games at Spartan Stadium, Breslin, Munn, you name it, will still have the same feel and hold the same traditions that Spartans know and love. But I think most importantly, it’s going to provide MSU athletics the infrastructure and resources to retain student-athletes, coaches and staff. And specifically, the department is going to be able to dramatically increase its commitment to the student-athlete commercial opportunities.”

MSU has a plan for the money. Earlier this month, Bartholomae vowed to give Fitzgerald’s football team more resources in an open letter to fans. That means spending more money on a roster, up from a budget reportedly in the range of $20 million to $25 million, per The Athletic.

The Spartans take on No. 9 UCLA this Saturday, Oct. 24, on a five-game losing streak and an 0-4 start to Big Ten play.

“Spartan Ventures aligns all of our revenue-generating units within a structure that lives outside of the university’s typical business structure, for a variety of reasons,” Bartholomae recently told The News. “What it is not, it is not the solution to NIL. It is a mechanism to allow us to generate revenues differently that should ultimately support NIL. We’re not there yet. It’s not new. Like, the (MSU) Research Foundation has the exact same setup, and they brought in $400 million to support research activities.”

It’ll be on Polisky to generate extra dough, but he’s experienced in this. His role at Northwestern involved branding and strategy, marketing, ticket sales and corporate sponsorships. He also is said to have brought in big investments with the Association of Pickleball Professionals.

How Polisky, Bartholomae and other officials mold Spartan Ventures in its infancy is unknown.

“It’s evolving,” Bartholomae told The News in a recent interview. “When they launched it, they launched it with an AD (Batt) and a CEO (Palumbo) who are gone. And now there’s a new AD and there’s a new CEO … so for me to sit here and say that I can tell you what our style and what our stamp on that is going to be, I’m not going to be able to do that, I don’t even want to. That would be irresponsible.”

cearegood@detroitnews.com

@ConnorEaregood

tpaul@detroitnews.com

@TonyPaul1984

This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: MSU hires Mike Polisky as deputy AD, Spartan Ventures CEO. Who is he?

Reporting by Connor Earegood and Tony Paul, The Detroit News / The Detroit News

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