Georgia Tech hires J Batt from Alabama as new athletic director

[drɘxɘl 69]

Georgia Tech hires J Batt from Alabama as new athletic director

 

Georgia Tech has hired Alabama executive deputy athletic director J Batt as its new athletic director, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Batt has been at Alabama since 2017 and has been heavily involved in revenue generation as well as having oversight of several areas of internal operations, according to his bio on the Alabama athletics website.

Batt succeeds Todd Stansbury, who was dismissed after six years Sept. 26 along with football coach Geoff Collins.

 

Batt emerged as the top candidate of a search that was completed in about 2-1/2 weeks, an unusually quick turnaround for an AD hire. Tech President Ángel Cabrera and interim AD Frank Neville, who led the search with assistance from Parker Executive Search, valued a strong background in football and evidently put a premium on Batt’s time with the most successful program over the past 10-plus years.

Batt, who played soccer for North Carolina and was a part of its 2001 national championship team, will be in the athletic director chair for the first time in his career. He is said to be an administrator with vast potential, but will have a big decision on his plate as soon as he arrives.

The primary reason for why Cabrera and Neville wanted to complete the AD search quickly was to give the new AD time to evaluate the football team and make a hire of a full-time coach to replace Collins.

Having been at Alabama since 2017, Batt likely knows Tech interim coach Brent Key, who has led the Yellow Jackets to back-to-back wins since being promoted, and certainly can get an in-depth assessment from Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban. Key was Alabama’s offensive line coach from 2016-18 before coming to Tech.

Alabama has another potential candidate on its staff in offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien, who was on the staffs of Tech coaches George O’Leary and Chan Gailey.

Undoubtedly, Batt’s fundraising experience – he oversaw the implementation of a 10-year, $600 million capital campaign – met the approval of Cabrera and Neville. Tech operates one of the smaller budgets in the ACC, both overall and for football, finished the last fiscal year with a reserve fund in a $12.1 million deficit and is slated to spend more than $13 million of its $105 million budget on debt service.

At the Sept. 27 news conference introducing Neville and Key, Cabrera said that “I am committed to doing anything that needs to happen to return our program to the place where it belongs – among the best in our conference, among the best programs in our country” and also that he was focused on equipping the new AD “with whatever resources they need to turn this program around.”

Tech has long been accustomed to trying to make more out of less. The hire of an administrator from an athletic department that likely isn’t pinching pennies may speak to Cabrera putting action behind his words.

In the 2021 fiscal year, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, Tech’s athletics budget was $86.2 million, with $19.9 million spent on football. Alabama’s budget was $179.8 million, with $59.5 million going to football – nearly triple Tech’s spending.

Alabama, of course, received significantly more revenue through ESPN’s television contract with the SEC than did Tech through the ACC’s contract with the network and averaged almost 99,000 fans per home game at Bryant-Denny Stadium last year. Tech, meanwhile, averaged 37,733, 55th in FBS, its lowest average since 1989.

The story will be updated.

[AURealist 2,185]

Seems Tech has finally realized that college football is a business and it's important to hire people who know that business.

I wonder if we're thinking the same.