The Long Game: Jegil Dugger goes from UAB backfields to entrepreneur boardrooms

Jegil Dugger takes the stage at Sloss Tech on Thursday afternoon. The panel is called “From Athlete to Operator: High-Performance Frameworks for Founders & Investors.” For a former UAB running back turned tech founder, that title reads like a resume.

Long before he founded a tech company, Dugger carried the football for UAB. They called him “Thrill.” But he had to earn that name.

The Midfield High School product rushed for 1,555 yards his senior year and arrived at UAB in 1998 as a top-50 recruit per Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report. He gained 293 yards in his first two seasons. He was a backup. Then Carl Fair went down in the 2000 season opener and Dugger seized the job — 852 yards, a 13-10 upset at LSU in Baton Rouge, team captain by his senior year.

“When he got here he could run,” coach Watson Brown told the Birmingham Post-Herald. “But he wasn’t very strong, he wasn’t a great blocker, he wasn’t a receiver, he wasn’t a tough runner inside sometimes. He’s gotten all that now. He’s put the whole game together.”

He finished with 1,979 yards and 13 touchdowns — sixth on UAB’s all-time rushing list at the time, still ninth today. He tried the NFL with Buffalo and Oakland, then headed north to play for Edmonton in the CFL. When football ended, he taught history and coached high school ball. Then he followed his father into business.

The first venture took off — roughly $2 million in revenue in its early years, clients coast to coast. The second — a tobacco company — led to a federal trademark infringement indictment. He spent a year and a day at Federal Prison Camp Maxwell in Montgomery.

“I cried the first night,” Dugger told the Hoover Sun. “I felt alone. I had worked hard to get my degree and to start my business, and then it just seemed to fall apart.”

Grace Dugger made the drive to Montgomery every week and held the company together in his absence. “He’s a good person at heart,” she told the Hoover Sun. “We all make mistakes. We chose to work through it. It was not easy. We found out who our true village was.”

Dugger came back. The next idea found him at a gas station — filling up when the name landed: Pye. Part math, part menu. He built a self-service kiosk platform for the restaurant and retail industries, engineered to accept cash and cards because roughly 20 percent of Americans are unbanked or underbanked and Dugger refused to leave them on the outside.

“For me, accessibility isn’t a feature, it’s the foundation,” he told the Sun. “I know what exclusion feels like, and I’m committed to building solutions that bridge the gap, not widen it.”

He taught himself the patent process at the public library, found an attorney and designed the full product end to end — the screens, the software, the industrial design. When the patent came through, it landed like a Friday night under the lights.

“It was like when I was in high school and I rushed for 200 yards in a game,” he told the Hoover Sun. “It was an awesome feeling. I told myself, ‘I can do this.’”

Pye landed an early partnership with Dunkin’ Donuts at Meadowlands Racing & Entertainment and kept scaling. The client list now spans two countries — from dry cleaners and bars to a military base in Virginia and Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The former Blazer who hatched the idea at a gas pump has been on Super Bowl radio row telling his story.

After UAB reinstated football in 2017, Dugger committed $100,000 to the program that raised him. In 2025, the UAB National Alumni Society named Pye one of its Fast 40 — the university’s fastest-growing alumni-owned businesses.

Everybody talks about what’s wrong with NIL. Nobody asks what Jegil Dugger would have done with it.

The connection between athletics and entrepreneurship is not new. In a keynote called “Why Athletes Matter,” Maurides cites numbers that frame the scale: 95 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs played competitive sports, 94 percent of C-level female executives are former athletes and 72 percent of U.S. presidents in the last century competed in college athletics. The pipeline from locker room to boardroom has always been there.

What didn’t exist was permission.

When Dugger played at UAB, college athletes could not monetize their name. Could not build a brand. Could not turn the platform that college athletics gave them into a business. His path from athlete to entrepreneur took 15 years, a federal sentence and a decade of rebuilding. He assembled everything from scratch.

He’s not the only one who paid that tax. Zach Maurides, a former Duke offensive lineman, built the concept for Teamworks as a class project while still competing. Under NCAA rules, he couldn’t commercialize it as a student-athlete. He founded the company after graduating and built it into the leading operations platform across college and professional sports. Teamworks reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025.

NIL changed the equation. For all the noise about bidding wars and portal chaos, NIL is also the first time a college athlete can legally build a business around the audience they already have. The platform, the revenue stream, the personal brand — all available before the jersey comes off.

An athlete at UAB right now doesn’t have to wait. The same opportunity exists for a sophomore who understands what the moment actually is. The question is whether they treat NIL as a paycheck or a launchpad.

Dugger wrote on LinkedIn: “Being the founder of a startup, just as in football, is most often a game of inches, not yards. Most often the strategy is not on the big play, but on getting the first down, on keeping the chains moving and on living to fight another round.”

The discipline transfers. The pain tolerance transfers. The ability to lose on Saturday and show up Monday ready to learn from mistakes and go to work transfers.

“I hope it’s a motivational story — one where people realize you can overcome adversity and that it builds character,” Dugger told the Hoover Sun. “We are not as bad as our worst mistake, and we’re not as good as anything we’ve done.”

He says it Thursday at Sloss Tech. And somewhere in Birmingham, a kid in a green and gold jersey has the chance to start building right now — with a head start Jegil “Thrill” Dugger never had.

Jegil Dugger speaks at Sloss Tech on Thursday, June 25, at 3:45 p.m. at Sidewalk Film Center & Cinema. Diane Poole profiled Dugger’s full journey in the Hoover Sun.