The Search, Part 3: The obvious names

Part 3 of a 7-part series on the UAB athletic director search. Read Part 1: The job | Part 2: The profile | The Ingram departure | The fan reaction

The job has only been open since Aug. 18 and the names are already everywhere — group texts, message boards, bar stools, booster dinners. Every AD search produces this list. The names fans reach for first, the ones that feel right because of what those people mean to the program.

What follows is not a candidate slate. Diehard is not endorsing or predicting. These are the names UAB fans are already discussing, evaluated honestly — who they are, why their names come up and what stands between the conversation and reality.

Andy Kennedy

Kennedy is already in the chair.

The UAB men's basketball coach was named interim athletic director on August 18, the same day Mark Ingram's departure was announced. He is running the department while coaching a team that has won 145 games in six seasons, posted a .700 winning percentage and earned a contract extension through 2030-31. He holds or shares 20 Blazer records as a player. He is the winningest coach in Ole Miss basketball history, a two-time SEC Coach of the Year and a UAB alum who chose to come home when he could have coached at programs with bigger budgets and bigger stages. His career record is 411-231.

The appeal of Kennedy goes beyond the resume. He loves this program. He is a fighter. He is the caretaker of his head coach's legacy — every recruiting visit, every game, every season reinforces what UAB basketball means to him personally. The early buzz inside the department and within booster ranks is that he is wowing people in the interim role. The support is not performative. Boosters who have watched AD transitions come and go are saying they would run through walls for Kennedy. That is genuine, and it matters.

Kennedy has never held an administrative position in athletics. His career path is player, assistant coach, head coach, broadcaster, head coach. The traditional framing would stop there and say he is unqualified.

But the traditional framing may be the wrong lens. Part 2 of this series examined how USF hired Rob Higgins — not from the AD pipeline, but as a CEO of Athletics. The college athletics landscape has shifted beneath every job description in the industry. Perhaps Kennedy represents an opportunity to retool what the AD role looks like at UAB: the head basketball coach and big-vision leader at the top, a strong operational No. 2 beneath him and a general manager to work the revenue-sharing side of the house for football, basketball and the other sports. If the job can be restructured around the right team, Kennedy's institutional commitment and ability to galvanize donors could matter more than a conventional AD resume.

Whether Kennedy wants the permanent role long-term is an open question — one he may not have answered for himself yet. How long does he still want to coach? What would the dual role look like in Year 3 or Year 5? Those are real questions without easy answers. But dismissing him outright because he lacks administrative experience ignores the possibility that the job itself is changing — and that the right person to lead through the change might be the one already in the building who has this fan base's full confidence.

Kennedy's passion for the program was on display Thursday when he met with the football team after practice. Any UAB fan watching this immediately ran through a brick wall and then opened their wallet.

Bill Clark

If there were a Mount Rushmore of UAB athletics, Bill Clark's bust would be on the side of the mountain.

Clark coached UAB football for eight years, including two when there was no football to coach. When the university shut down the program in December 2014, he stayed. He did not pursue other jobs. He recruited without a team. He held a staff together on belief alone. The program came back in 2017. Clark went 49-26 in six playing seasons, won two Conference USA championships, earned the Eddie Robinson National Coach of the Year award in 2018 — the first Conference USA coach ever to receive it — and beat No. 13 BYU in his final game. He retired in June 2022 because chronic back problems required spinal fusion surgery. He was 53.

Before UAB, he went 106-11 at Prattville High School with two state championships and 11-4 in one season at Jacksonville State, winning the program's first FCS playoff games. "We rose from the ashes to build something rare and real, and we did it together," he said when he retired.

Bill Clark is great at pretty much anything he does. He is a true leader — a leader who can galvanize this community and this fan base like no one else alive. There would probably be genuine interest on his part under certain circumstances. UAB football is his program. The satisfaction of coming in and finishing the job would appeal to him.

But a lot would have to happen. Would he and President Watts be able to work together? Would either of them be willing? There are real financial challenges involving Clark's state retirement — returning to a state payroll after retirement is not a simple matter of accepting the job. And Clark has been out of college sports since 2022. That absence may have given him time and perspective on how he would approach the role. It also means he has not been in the trenches in real time, working through what NIL and revenue sharing have meant for Group of 6 schools day to day.

Clark has never been an athletic director. He has never held an administrative position. His post-retirement interest has been in coaching — he told Yellowhammer Sports in late 2024 that he was "ready to explore" coaching opportunities. His name surfaced for the UAB head coaching job after Trent Dilfer was fired in October 2025.

And if there is a path, the first step belongs to UAB.

Bill Clark is not going to apply for this job. He is not going to lobby for it. He is not going to go through a search committee process. He has earned that. That is not Clark saying it — that is me saying it, based on years of covering coaching and athletic director searches and years of hiring top talent myself. When you have done what Bill Clark has done for a program, you do not sit in a waiting room with a stack of resumes.

The only way this starts is UAB picking up the phone and saying something to the effect of: Coach Clark, we are sorry. We need you to come back and fix this. What would you need from us to make that happen?

Whether institutional pride allows that call is its own question. But if the call is made and Clark engages, then the two sides figure out whether there is a realistic path — whether UAB is willing to do what Clark believes would be needed to do it right. That is a negotiation between adults, not a search process.

The fan base's desire to see Clark back at UAB is genuine, deep and well-earned. Whether that desire can navigate the distance between emotional connection and operational reality is a different question — one that requires a lot of things to break right for even genuine interest to become reality.

Murry Bartow

The Bartow name is not simply on the building. It is in the athletic department's DNA.

Gene Bartow left UCLA — where he had succeeded John Wooden — to build UAB's athletic department from nothing in 1977. He was the first basketball coach. He was the first athletic director. He took the Blazers to the Elite Eight by 1982. The arena bears his name. He was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009. He died in Birmingham in 2012 at 81.

Murry is Gene's son. He played at UAB from 1981 to 1985 — four NCAA Tournament teams, three Sun Belt championships. He earned a graduate assistant position at Indiana under Bob Knight, where he was part of the 1987 national championship staff. He returned to UAB as an assistant under his father for seven seasons, then succeeded Gene as head coach in 1996 and went 103-83 with an NCAA Tournament appearance in 1999. He later coached 12 seasons at East Tennessee State, producing 224 wins and three NCAA Tournament bids, and served as interim head coach at both South Florida and UCLA — where his father had once followed John Wooden. His career head coaching record is 338-274 across 20 seasons. He has spent a full career in college athletics.

He is currently the radio color commentator for UAB men's basketball broadcasts and an amateur scout for the Charlotte Hornets. He turned 65 on August 18.

Murry Bartow has never been an athletic director. His father was. Whether Bartow has any interest in the role is unclear. But there are fans who want Blazer blood in the AD chair badly enough that they are willing to overlook administrative inexperience for the comfort of knowing the person leading the department wants the very best for the program and has a real stake in it. That impulse — loyalty over resume — runs through most of the names on this list.

Brad Hardekopf

Hardekopf has been the No. 2 in the athletic department for years, and fans know it.

He has been at UAB since September 2008, rising from director of sales to deputy athletics director for external relations over 18 years. He runs Blazer Boosters, ticket sales, fan engagement, marketing, athletics communications, creative services and the Learfield/Blazer Sports Properties relationship. He was the point person for UAB Athletics during the university's $1 billion campaign. Under his direction, Blazer Boosters hit $9.5 million in cash received in 2017 with a 27% increase in donor membership to 1,841 supporters. He helped orchestrate the fundraising behind football's return. The facilities funded on his watch include the $22.5 million Football Operations Center, the basketball practice facility, Legacy Pavilion, Mary Bowers Field and the Olympic track and field complex.

An Auburn graduate and Birmingham native, Hardekopf has spent much of the past decade working closely with boosters and the Athletic Foundation. His name is regularly mentioned by fans as the next AD.

It surprised some, then, that Hardekopf was not named interim athletic director when Ingram departed. Kennedy was. What that portends for Hardekopf's viability as a permanent candidate is an open question, but many people inside the program and out would reasonably assume that being passed over for the interim role is a signal. Whether that signal reflects the search committee's thinking or simply the practical reality of Kennedy's profile and visibility is something only the people who made the decision can answer.

Shannon Ealy and Marla Townsend

Two names. One thread.

Marla Townsend built UAB softball from its first game. Hired by Gene Bartow in 1998, she was the program's first and only head coach for 18 seasons — 532-507, three-time Conference USA Coach of the Year, five consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances from 2010 to 2014, a 2013 Regional championship that included wins over UCLA and No. 15 Louisville. Nine 30-win seasons. The only coach in UAB history to reach 500 wins. In 2017, Mark Ingram promoted her to Senior Associate Athletics Director for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement. She was inducted into the UAB Athletics Hall of Fame in 2024.

Shannon Ealy was a long-time senior-level administrator who served as UAB's interim athletic director after Brian Mackin departed when the shutdown decision was made in December 2014. Ealy led the department through the most volatile period in its history. All three discontinued sports were reinstated within six months, supported by approximately $27 million in fundraising. He was involved in hiring Bill Clark. Clark called him "instrumental." Before UAB, Ealy spent four years at the SEC Conference office in Birmingham, seven years with the Alabama Sports Foundation producing major events and managed UAB's $30 million-plus annual budget as the department's second-in-command.

Both were strong leaders during their time at UAB. Both were pushed out. Townsend was unceremoniously removed from her Senior Associate AD role amid the aftermath of football's restoration — a move that stung supporters who believed her steadfast advocacy for bringing football back deserved better. Ealy was widely viewed as having done a marvelous job in the interim role, only to be passed over when Ingram was hired in 2015. He took a settlement and left.

Townsend now runs Be Elite LLC, a consulting and speaking practice, and EmpowerU, a nonprofit she founded. She lives in the Birmingham area. Ealy returned to Birmingham in 2022 as general manager of the Hoover Metropolitan Complex, where he has produced record attendance — 785,000 visitors in fiscal 2025 — and a record $101 million in economic impact.

Both would have the confidence of the fan base. Both are true Blazers with institutional knowledge few can match. But they are farther removed from leading through the new paradigms — House settlement economics, NIL infrastructure, conference realignment — than almost anyone on this list. And the same question that hangs over Bill Clark's candidacy hangs over theirs: would the administration bring them back, and would they want to work for this administration?

Their names belong in this conversation. Rightfully so.

Greg Seitz

Seitz is 90 minutes up Interstate 59 in Jacksonville, and the comparison is not lost on UAB fans.

He arrived at Jacksonville State in 1993 as an assistant sports information director. He has never worked anywhere else. He rose through every rank — SID, associate AD, senior associate AD, three stints as interim AD — before being named the permanent director of athletics in February 2016. His tenure as AD includes the most complex FBS transition in recent Group of 6 history: three conference changes in four years — Ohio Valley Conference to ASUN to Conference USA — a full FBS membership application and a bowl victory in the program's first FBS season. JSU beat Louisiana 34-31 in overtime in the 2023 New Orleans Bowl to become the first program in NCAA history to win a bowl game in its first FBS season.

And JSU has not stopped building. Seitz hired Rich Rodriguez and then Charles Kelly from Auburn. Football won a conference title and followed it with an appearance in the conference championship game. Men's basketball has made multiple postseason appearances. The bowling program won its second NCAA national championship in three years. The baseball team made NCAA regionals. The Gamecocks have raised money, built facilities — an $80 million stadium development plan, a $32 million football complex that opened in July 2024, a $23 million indoor practice facility — leaned into their biggest boosters and launched an in-house NIL operation. They have done more with less, frankly, than any Group of 6 program in Alabama since moving to FBS.

The numbers bear it out. In the 2025-26 LEARFIELD Directors' Cup final standings — the measure of overall athletic department success based on NCAA postseason finishes across 19 sports — Jacksonville State finished 95th nationally with a program-record 220 points, trailing only Liberty in Conference USA. Among in-state schools, JSU trailed only Alabama and Auburn for the second consecutive year.

UAB did not score a point. For the second consecutive year.

JSU's five-year trajectory: 266th, unranked, 123rd, 141st, 95th. UAB's: 196th, 243rd, 262nd, unranked, unranked.

Seitz's salary at Jacksonville State is $178,500. The American is a clear step up from Conference USA. Birmingham is a larger market than Jacksonville. Seitz is a sitting athletic director with a proven record of building a program from the FCS level into a competitive, multi-sport FBS department — and the Director's Cup trajectory to prove it.

He has never worked anywhere other than Jacksonville State. Thirty-three years at one school is either the deepest possible institutional knowledge or the narrowest possible professional lens, depending on who is doing the evaluating. But the results at JSU speak for themselves — and they speak loudly enough that UAB fans already know the name.

Next: Part 4 — The names you don't know. The candidates from inside college athletics with UAB ties, Birmingham roots or conference experience that the fan base has not discussed yet — but the search committee very possibly will.