Higher education (HE) reforms are usually inspired by New Public Management (NPM) global reform scripts. This article focuses on a pivotal object of NPM-driven reforms--central university governance structures. On the one hand, we present the founding ideas of NPM and sketch how they translate for these structures; on the other hand, two further ideal-type public management narratives to conceptualize reforms (Network Governance and Neo-Weberianism) are presented and we deduct the ideal-type institutional governance structures according to each. Then, we take Italy and Portugal as case studies--two countries in the Napoleonic administrative tradition where previous research has stressed that HE reforms differ from the NPM ideal--and we develop a multi-level analysis (at policy and university levels) to compare their central institutional governance structures with the NPM-driven ideal. Our findings show that both countries present hybrid reform outcomes with similar choices in several aspects that differ from the NPM-driven practical outcomes; thus, a specific regional variance is recognizable. Yet, these structures reflect the Neo-Weberian founding ideas rather than those of NPM. The research implications and possible explanations to reconcile the decoupling between discursive convergence on NPM global reform scripts and Neo-Weberian reform outcomes are discussed.