The Search, Part 7: The outside-the-box hire

Ingram departure | Fan reaction | Part 1: The Job | Part 2: The Profile | Part 3: The Obvious Names | Part 4: The Birmingham Connections | Part 5: The Basketball Background | Part 6: The Builders | Bill Clark interest | Epilogue: The Dream List

For decades, the path to becoming a college athletic director was well-worn and narrow. Graduate assistantship. Compliance office. External relations. Associate AD. Deputy AD. AD. Along the way, the same master's programs, the same conferences, the same playbook around multimedia rights, ticket sales and corporate partnerships. There was not a lot of innovation — and there did not need to be. The model worked. More importantly, following the model was defensible. A university president who hired a career AD from the traditional pipeline and things went sideways could point to the process. That's how they do it at Missouri. That's how they do it at Tennessee. The safe bet was the same bet everyone else was making.

The current era is blowing that up — in court and in the court of public opinion — almost daily. The House v. NCAA settlement rewrote the economics. Revenue sharing with athletes is now a line item, not a theoretical exercise. The transfer portal remade roster management. NIL turned compliance offices into something closer to talent agencies. Conference realignment reshuffled the competitive landscape twice in three years. The job description for an athletic director in 2026 bears almost no resemblance to the one Mark Ingram accepted in 2015.

In any period of disruption, there are first-movers and there are last-reactors. The first-movers look outside the established system for people who can solve today's problems — often because those people are not anchored to yesterday's methods. The last-reactors hire from the same pipeline and hope the old playbook still works. Sometimes disruption resolves itself and the cautious approach wins. This does not feel like one of those times.

The most visible example of a first-mover in college athletics right now resides in Tampa, Florida.

On Sept. 9, 2025, the University of South Florida named Rob Higgins its CEO of Athletics — the only title of its kind in college sports. Higgins did not come from the AD pipeline. He spent more than 20 years as executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission. He is a USF alum. He was a Bulls ballboy as a kid.

"When you're dealing with a nine-figure business, it needs to be treated as such," Higgins told Athlon Sports.

Eight months later: three high-profile coaching hires, including Brian Hartline to run football. Derrick Brooks — Pro Football Hall of Famer — as chief operating officer. A $348.5 million on-campus football stadium opening in 2027. And a fan sentiment survey that showed 95 percent approval with a 9.6-out-of-10 communication score — tied for the highest marks in the American Athletic Conference. USF hasn't won yet. Its fan base believes it's about to.

Diehard wrote about Higgins and the USF model earlier this summer. What he is building in Tampa is what the disruption makes possible — and what it may soon demand.

The previous installments of this series profiled the job itself, how searches work and then four groups of sitting athletic directors, deputies and senior associates — career athletics administrators whose resumes follow the traditional pipeline. This one looks at a different pool. These are leaders whose careers were built outside college athletics administration entirely — in city government, professional sports, sports business, venture capital, event management and digital media. None of them climbed the associate-to-deputy-to-AD ladder.

A note repeated from earlier in this series: Diehard is not building a candidate list. We have no knowledge of who has applied, who has been contacted or who is under consideration. Or even whether any of that is in progress at this time. None of the people profiled below are being identified as candidates for the UAB athletic director job. What we are doing is using real people and real resumes to show fans the talent pool that exists — and to give them a window into how a search might think beyond the traditional pipeline.

Walt Maddox

I went to college with Walt Maddox. We arrived at UAB in the fall of 1991 together. He was an undersized defensive tackle on the first NCAA football team in school history — Division III, the very beginning of the program. I was a student-assistant SID working with the new football team.

Walt used to come into the sports information office to see if I had any photos of him from the games. I did. One is a picture of him celebrating a fumble recovery in UAB's very first NCAA game on Sept. 7, 1991.

Even then, Maddox talked about politics and public service. He was a political science student who told people he wanted to work in government someday. He earned both of his degrees from UAB.

He did more than work in government. He became the mayor of Tuscaloosa.

Maddox has held the office since 2005 — six terms, re-elected with 87 percent of the vote in 2025. In a state where Democratic politicians face structural headwinds at every level, that number says everything about how the city views his leadership.

On April 27, 2011, a high-end EF4 tornado struck Tuscaloosa with winds near 190 mph and a path nearly a mile wide. Part of the historic 2011 Super Outbreak, the storm killed 53 people in Tuscaloosa — 64 total along its path into Birmingham — injured more than 1,500 and destroyed thousands of structures. The damage was catastrophic. The images from that day remain seared into the memory of everyone who lived through it.

Maddox's leadership during the crisis and the subsequent rebuild defined his career. Under his direction, the city managed $140 million across 40 projects and attracted $1.1 billion in total investment to the tornado zone. He earned praise from both sides of the political spectrum — in a state where that is genuinely difficult.

He ran for governor in 2018, won the Democratic primary with 55 percent of the vote and lost the general election to incumbent Republican Kay Ivey. In deep-red Alabama, the general election result was not a surprise. The primary win was the story — and the bipartisan respect he carries in Tuscaloosa is the bigger one.

In March 2026, he was named chairman of the SEC Mayors Alliance. He works with the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees as a matter of daily governance — he is the mayor of their city. UAB reports to the same board. That relationship is one of the most important dynamics in UAB athletics, and Maddox already navigates it.

But Maddox has never been far from athletics, either. He played a role behind the scenes in the fight to restore UAB football after the 2014 shutdown. He bleeds green and gold. UAB gave him his start, and he has never forgotten it.

There is no one on any potential candidate list — traditional or otherwise — who combines UAB loyalty, political acumen, crisis leadership, fundraising at scale and a working relationship with the UA System board the way Walt Maddox does.

Izell Reese

Reese arrived at UAB without a scholarship. He walked on as a safety and earned one. He became one of the foundational players in a program that rose from Division III through FCS to FBS — and he was part of that entire climb. By the time he left, he had 276 career tackles, 180 solo tackles and seven interceptions. He was the second UAB player ever drafted — sixth round, Dallas Cowboys, 1998. He played seven NFL seasons with the Cowboys, Broncos and Bills, finishing with 93 games, 245 tackles and eight interceptions.

Reese was inducted into the UAB Athletics Hall of Fame in the Class of 2024. He served on the search committee that resulted in UAB hiring Bill Clark in 2014 — the coach who rebuilt the program after the shutdown and won two conference championships. Reese has stayed involved with his school.

His post-playing career is where the outside-the-box case gets interesting.

After 12 years as executive vice president of youth sports events at NCSA, Reese founded RCX Sports in 2019. RCX became the official operator of NFL FLAG Football — the league's youth and amateur flag football platform. Under Reese's leadership, NFL FLAG grew from approximately 200,000 participants to more than one million. In June 2026, Eli Manning's Brand Velocity Group acquired RCX Sports. Reese stayed on as CEO.

Flag football will debut as an Olympic sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Reese built the grassroots foundation of a sport that is now headed to the Olympics — growing NFL FLAG from a niche youth program into a million-participant national platform. He built a national sports business from scratch and sold it to a company backed by one of the most recognizable athletes in NFL history — and kept the keys. That is not a traditional AD resume. It is, however, a resume that demonstrates the ability to build something from nothing, scale it nationally and manage the business side of a sports organization at the highest level.

He is also a UAB man. From walk-on to the Hall of Fame. That carries weight in Birmingham.

Nick Sellers

Sellers is a Birmingham native. His grandfather, Sam "Bosco" Giambrone, was a first-generation Sicilian-American who sold paper products to Birmingham restaurants for nearly 60 years. Sellers grew up in the city, attended Our Lady of Sorrows in Homewood and went to college at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he played quarterback. He started against the No. 2 Nebraska Cornhuskers — threw for 132 yards and a touchdown in a 49-7 loss, which is about as good as it was going to get against Tom Osborne's 1995 Huskers. He holds a law degree from the Birmingham School of Law.

His career in Birmingham sports infrastructure runs deep. As director of operations for the Alabama Sports Foundation, he managed the SEC Baseball Tournament at Hoover, the Magic City Classic and Davis Cup tennis. He spent time at the Business Council of Alabama working in economic development. He rose to vice president of Alabama Power's Mobile Division.

Then, in 2019, he was recruited to run the biggest international sporting event in Alabama history.

As CEO of The World Games 2022, Sellers led a 70-person staff and local organizing committee that brought nearly 3,500 athletes from nearly 100 countries to Birmingham for 11 days of competition across 34 sports. The event was the most complex sports operation the city had ever hosted, and Sellers ran it.

He served as chairman of the Alabama Sports Council. He knows Protective Stadium. He knows the corporate stakeholder landscape in Birmingham because he has worked in it for two decades. He knows the event operations side because he has run events at every scale the city has to offer.

The question with a non-traditional candidate is always whether the person can navigate the internal politics of a university. Sellers has navigated state government, a Fortune 500 utility company and an international multi-sport event with more than 100 participating nations. University politics would not be new terrain.

Jack Patterson

Patterson's career has been built in one place: the intersection of sports, brands and revenue. He started at Walt Disney World as a corporate marketing manager. He worked in corporate sales at SFX Sports Group, then regional sales at Comcast Spectacor — the company that owns the Philadelphia Flyers and manages arena operations. He was the director of strategic marketing for the Washington Redskins. He sold enterprise social media platforms to the Lakers, the PGA, NBA Global and 30 professional teams at Spredfast.

In April 2017, Learfield IMG College — the company that manages multimedia rights, sponsorships and digital media for more than 200 collegiate properties including the NCAA — hired Patterson as its first-ever vice president of social media. He built Learfield Digital into a full-service digital and social engine for college athletics.

Patterson now runs JCP Strategy, a consultancy focused on digital monetization for sports properties — specifically helping schools leverage first-party fan data and connected TV campaigns as part of sponsorship packages.

He has never worked inside a college athletic department. What he has done is spend 25 years generating revenue for sports organizations — professional and collegiate — through digital, sponsorship and brand partnerships. The job description for a modern athletic director reads like Patterson's career history. Every AD in the country is trying to do what Patterson has been doing for two decades: turn a fan base into a revenue engine through media, data and brand partnerships.

Gene Hallman

My first interactions with Gene Hallman go back to 1996. I was a young reporter — an intern, really — working my first metro beat. The assignment was Olympic soccer, which was coming to Birmingham as part of the Atlanta Games. Gene was leading the effort to bring Olympic soccer to Legion Field through the Alabama Sports Foundation.

In one of my dumb columns — and yes, I have written a few — I predicted the whole thing would be a disaster because Americans, and Birmingham in particular, did not care about soccer.

I was dead wrong.

On July 20, 1996, a crowd of 83,183 packed Legion Field for USA vs. Argentina. Claudio Reyna scored for the U.S. in the first minute, and the roar that followed remains the loudest crowd noise I have heard at a game of any kind. The chants of U-S-A shook the stadium. Over the course of the tournament, Legion Field hosted 11 matches and drew more than 431,000 fans — selling more tickets than the other Olympic satellite cities combined.

I learned that day never to underestimate Gene Hallman's ability to draw a crowd or run a great event.

Thirty years later, his track record in Birmingham has no peer.

Hallman co-founded Bruno Event Team in 1995 with Ronnie Bruno. The company rebranded to Eventive Sports in 2023 and was acquired by Troon in January 2024, with Hallman staying on to lead from Birmingham. The operation grew to more than 90 employees, managing more than 250 major sporting events across 35 states and three countries.

His event portfolio reads like a catalog of every significant sports property that has come through Alabama: the Regions Tradition, a PGA Champions Tour major that has raised more than $20 million for charity. The SEC Baseball Tournament at Hoover, which he has managed since 1998. The INDYCAR race at Barber Motorsports Park, where he serves as CEO of ZOOM Motorsports and draws 80,000-plus fans annually. More than 20 USGA national championships, including U.S. Women's Opens and the Walker Cup. NCAA tournament games. Davis Cup ties. The National Senior Games.

He runs gameday operations for Alabama, Auburn, UAB and Alabama State. He managed the marketing and gameday operations for the USFL's Birmingham Stallions — at Protective Stadium, the building UAB plays football in. He ran the Magic City Classic, the largest HBCU football game in the country, for more than two decades through the Alabama Sports Council, where he serves as CEO.

And in 2022, when Birmingham hosted The World Games, Hallman was at the center of the logistics that made it work.

In 2022, he was honored as the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame's Distinguished American Sportsman.

Hallman called the honor "the most noteworthy professional recognition that I will receive in my career."

He lives in Vestavia Hills. He has been in Birmingham since November 1991. He has built more sports infrastructure, managed more major events and generated more sports-related revenue in this city than anyone alive.

Of the six people profiled in this installment, Hallman is the closest analog to what USF did with Rob Higgins. Higgins spent 20-plus years running the Tampa Bay Sports Commission and building the sports event infrastructure of a major Florida metro before USF hired him to run its athletic department. Hallman has spent 30-plus years doing the same thing in Birmingham — at a scale that is arguably deeper, given the breadth of properties he has managed.

Higgins walked into USF with relationships across Tampa Bay's corporate, civic and sports landscape. Hallman already has those relationships in Birmingham. Every corporate sponsor. Every venue operator. Every civic leader. Every media partner. He has worked with all of them — for decades.

The difference is that no one has asked.

Bryan Calka

Calka is already inside the American Athletic Conference.

In May 2025, Commissioner Tim Pernetti announced the creation of American RISE Ventures — Revenue, Innovation, Sports, Entertainment — a new business division created to lead all aspects of the conference's revenue generation, sponsorship strategy, media rights, brand partnerships, technology and long-term commercial innovation. Calka was named chief commercial officer to run it.

"His proven track record as a cutting-edge revenue leader and bold, strategic thinker makes him the right fit to help guide the American through one of the most transformative periods in collegiate athletics," Pernetti said.

Calka brings nearly 25 years in professional sports revenue. He spent a decade as vice president of partnerships for the New York Yankees, managing sales and activation teams across one of the most valuable franchises in sports. He was senior vice president of global partnerships at BSE Global, overseeing partnership initiatives for Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Nets, the Long Island Nets and the New York Liberty. He was senior vice president of partnerships for the New York Islanders, leading corporate partnership strategy for the team and UBS Arena. Most recently, he was chief commercial officer of the Professional Fighters League, where he led significant revenue growth over two and a half years.

He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Hobart College.

What makes Calka's profile distinct in this group is the combination of pro sports revenue experience and current conference-level access. He already understands the American's media deals, its sponsorship landscape, its institutional dynamics and its competitive positioning. He works with every athletic director in the league. He knows the revenue model UAB operates in because he is building a commercial division designed to grow it.

The traditional AD pipeline produces administrators. Calka's career has produced revenue.

Next: The Dream List — who would we put on the short list, and who would you?