4 ways ‘The Ninja AD’ Greg Byrne automatically makes Alabama better

When news broke that Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne was taking the same position at Alabama, a lot of Professional Sports Journalism People like me applauded the move without explanation:

This is posturing, and it happens a lot. The accomplishments of athletic directors aren’t as well known publicly as they are inside the industry. We tend to talk about these people as if readers know them as well as we do, and almost always they don’t. It’s a bad habit of sports media people.

Which leads us to this question:

This is a good question! Especially considering that Byrne, a 45-year-old second generation AD, has made his career on renovation projects at Mississippi State and Arizona. Alabama is totally unlike those jobs.

Byrne’s a fantastic fundraiser who built coffers and improved facilities in Starkville and Tucson, but Bama already has an ungodly war chest (the USA Today database currently has its annual revenue at $148.9 million, fifth-largest in the nation) and waterfalls. They have waterfalls.

He’s made program-changing hires like Dan Mullen at Mississippi State and Rich Rodriguez at Arizona. Except that Alabama already has the best coach in college football, and second-year men’s basketball coach Avery Johnson has an impressive recruiting class headed to Tuscaloosa. So there’s a chance that Byrne won’t have to make a “big” hire any time soon.

So why is Byrne a good hire for Alabama?

1. Football aside, there is work to be done in Tuscaloosa.

The Tide lack the same dominance across revenue sports (namely men’s and women’s basketball and baseball) that schools like Florida, Ohio State, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Oregon have used to convert themselves into larger brands.

And if you’re thinking millions of Finebaum callers could care less as long as football wins, that’s beside the point. Not succeeding in sports year-round means there’s money being left on the table. And that’s exceedingly Un-Bama behavior.

That doesn’t mean Johnson is suddenly on notice. If anything, it means focus and effort (read: money and promotion) will be put into Bama basketball like never before. In the desert, lackluster fan support was a problem on Saturdays in the fall, not January and February. Byrne and his team engaged in an aggressive effort to educate and reform truant Wildcat fans. Imagine the basketball education initiative he’ll undertake for Tuscaloosa’s RV crowd.

2. He’s young and unafraid of change.

In SEC circles Byrne is credited with modernizing the Mississippi State athletic department following the departure of longtime, old-school AD Larry Templeton.

And when I say “modernizing,” I mean introducing concepts that didn’t exist before 2010, like social media accounts, on-staff graphic artists, and multimedia teams for marketing and recruiting purposes and digital accounts for donors and season ticket holders.

Sure, Bama has all that stuff now, but Byrne is aggressive with the next innovation.

“If anything, his upbringing in the business has pushed him to think ahead to the future instead of looking back at how things were done when his father was an A.D.,” a Power 5 AD told SB Nation. “He’s had to be innovative at Arizona and MSU, and I don’t think he’ll leave that at the door just because Alabama has a larger budget.”

3. He can make Bama even more powerful behind closed doors.

Byrne’s name has floated around every major opening from Florida to USC for a reason: he’s well-known and respected, but he’s also unafraid of a fight.

“He can be a killer behind closed doors. He was quick to earn respect [in the industry] for his track record, but also because he doesn’t take any shit. He’s a lot like Saban in that way,” a Power 5 AD told SB Nation.

That shit-taking note is important in Alabama. All is wonderful in the kingdom right now, but the Tide’s culture pre-Saban was a perpetual fight among booster factions vying for perceived control. Byrne name-checked the right folks at his introductory press conference — University system trustees Paul Bryant Jr. and Finis St. John — but he won’t kowtow. He’s not a Bama lifer and arrives with no debts to anyone in the Yellowhammer. He didn’t have to take this job.

Of course, how this translates to conference dealings will be fascinating. Byrne is a friend of Commissioner Greg Sankey, and both Florida AD Scott Stricklin and Mississippi State AD John Cohen worked for Byrne in Starkville. There’s no acclimation period. When the league meets in Destin this spring, Byrne will be comfortable representing the current power program.

In the Pac-12, Byrne was among a vocal group of ADs who opposed commissioner Larry Scott spending aggressively instead of passing revenue onto member schools. The disconnect between Scott and ADs like Byrne never got ugly in public, and ultimately the league kept its pricey office and network in downtown San Francisco, with ADs trusting in Scott’s process of spending more to earn big later.

But Arizona is not Alabama. Byrne has never had a job with this much clout, and it will be interesting to see how he, like Saban, uses Bama’s power to lobby the public and the sport’s decision makers.

Of course Alabama is just one member of the SEC and no different or more influential in the league’s decisions than any other memberlolololololol, oh man, I couldn’t even finish writing that.

4. He’s both public facing and incredibly hard to track.

Scariest of all for the media and best of all for Bama loyalists is that Byrne will be the university’s most interactive and humanized AD and simultaneously its quietest.

Byrne is legendary for his secrecy in coaching searches and decision-making. He earned the nickname “The Ninja” at MSU for coaching hires and fires that arrived with no warning and no leaks.

He talked about this to SB Nation in 2016:

"So much of what you read during that time is actually people trying to position themselves in all sorts of ways. Agents, coaches, schools. When I make a hire — and I’m in the process of doing this right now for women's basketball — every person I talk to, I say, ‘If I hear that according to sources, you’ve interviewed or according to sources, you’re now the leading candidate, I assume you don’t want the job. And if you want to try me, try me.'"

It’s not really hard to see why this will fit terrifyingly well in Saban’s Tuscaloosa.