New AD believes UT can reach new heights

An encyclopedic, deliberate search for the University of Toledo’s next athletic director officially ended on Monday.

The worst-kept secret in college athletics was out: Bryan Blair was coming to UT.

The Washington State deputy AD and chief operating officer will be introduced to the Toledo community on Thursday at an afternoon news conference.

The 37-year-old Blair takes over for the departing Mike O’Brien on May 1, assuming control of an athletic department that has competed at the highest level of the Mid-American Conference for two decades and is poised to achieve even more.

“Bryan brings a wealth of experience to this role, from strategic planning to budgeting to diversity and inclusion to academic success initiatives,” Toledo President Dr. Gregory Postel said.

“I’m excited to see what he will do, working with our outstanding coaches and athletic staff, to lift our Rockets to even greater heights.”

Blair, who arrived in town Tuesday evening after a cross-country flight with his family, has received considerable praise from athletic administrators and coaches at universities nationwide.

Blair’s career, which includes stints at the NCAA, Rice, and South Carolina, has been filled with big decisions, financial successes, and improving athletic programs.

The former Wofford football player — Blair was a senior captain and defensive lineman of the year for the FCS power — had a lengthy discussion with The Blade ahead of Thursday’s formal introduction, explaining why he coveted the Toledo job, his vision for the Rockets, and the alignment of the university and athletic department.

Question: You’re one of the most respected deputy ADs in the country. You’re someone people have a lot of nice things to say about. Clearly, you were going to be an athletic director in the future. Why Toledo?

Answer: I’m humbled by all the things people say. Sometimes I wonder who they’re talking about. My wife definitely has that response. That’s how she keeps me humble. I just think this is a fantastic opportunity. There’s a foundation in place that the staff and Mike and the coaches have built that makes it one of the best jobs in the MAC.

From a resource standpoint, from a city — you’re talking about the biggest city in the MAC — the business community is thriving right now, there are a lot of factors that say, OK, you can be successful here in every facet of what you’re trying to do, including hiring and retaining quality people. So often, these hires are made about one person, but you’re only as good as the people around you. So when you can hire and retain really good people, it makes what you’re trying to do a lot more attainable.

When you look at Toledo, you have a lot of people who have been there a long time. People like living there. People like working there. People like being a part of what they’re doing. You have two basketball programs that are No. 1 in the conference right now. Obviously, they’re having a really high level of success. There’s that foundation in place.

The box I needed to check on my visit was understanding Dr. Postel, what his vision was, and how he sees athletics fitting into that. I came away really impressed by him, by his vision, and how aggressive he wants to be in moving the needle for the university, and how athletics plays a role in that.

Last, and in some ways the least important because people don’t want to hear about this, but the opportunity to be near family and raise my kids near their cousins and aunts and uncles is a really good opportunity for me. [Blair’s wife, Jenna, is from Dayton.] I think it’ll make me a better AD to have that support system in place like I’ll need to do to get out and meet our supporters and go to the games. My wife won’t feel like she’s on an island by herself.

There were a handful of factors that you looked at and at every turn said, OK, wow, this might be the ideal fit — the ideal fit professionally, the ideal fit for what they need, the ideal fit for my family. For it to come true is a little bit of a dream.

Q: What is your vision for the University of Toledo athletic department and its 16 varsity sports?

A: I want to be the premier Group of Five program in the country. Now, you can say, ‘OK, that’s a nice slogan, but what does it mean?’ I want to help raise the profile of the university on a national level. I want to be nationally competitive. Certainly, we want to be synonymous with championships in the MAC. We’ll apply that standard across the board in everything that we do. That’s compliance. That’s academics. That’s fundraising. That’s the whole landscape. We want to set that standard to mark ourselves against the rest and make sure we’re operating at a really high standard.

There’s a great foundation in place. This is not walking into a terrible situation and a department that needs to go from a whole lot of issues and get them to be good or average. We’re talking about going from good to great. That’s from one of my favorite books — how do we take what’s there and flip it that extra notch to go to great? That’s from me engaging with our athletics staff, our coaches, our community, everybody involved. What’s it going to take for us to get to that next level? Let’s figure out that strategy and what those steps are and pull in the same direction.

If there’s nothing else there, that is the vision: for us to exhibit teamwork like never seen before. From coaches, staff, student-athletes, the entire campus, the entire city of Toledo, and the northwest Ohio community all pulling in the same direction in unison. We can do something powerful.

Q: What is the thought of Toledo around the country among athletic administrators?

A: I asked a lot of people about this job for feedback to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. When you talk to MAC ADs, when you talk to [conference] commissioners, when you talk to ADs around the country, people say Toledo is one of, if not the best, job in the MAC.

You start with that as a general framework but, the more I went through this process and got on campus and saw some of the facilities and talked to some individuals, I think there’s even more than people realize at Toledo. There’s more already being done and there’s more potential than people on the outside realize. It’s my job to help us as a team actualize that potential.

I walked away from my campus visit more excited than I was before I got to campus. I thought there was a ton of potential. I thought it was a great opportunity. I came away knowing it was a great opportunity and that there was more potential than a lot of people realized. All that’s been done so well by Mike and that crew for so long and, as we turn to this next chapter of Toledo athletics, I think we can do even more. We just have to be really strategic.

Q: Alignment is another one of those words that you always hear in college sports. As you went through this process talking to university leaders, search committee members, did you think there was alignment between the athletic department and the university?

A: I did. I asked some really good questions to everybody involved. This wasn’t just, let me tell you I’m taking the job no matter what and let’s float through trying to impress you. There were certainly the normal interview pieces, but I had questions in turn for everybody I met with to try and get a better understanding of the situation I’d be walking into and what their expectations of me as the new leader would be. And I got really good answers.

Everybody wants that teamwork. That’s not uncommon when you walk on a college campus. Everybody says they want to be a team, but what does that really mean at a base level? That means ‘we’ before ‘me.’ That means sometimes I might not get my way to help you get your way. It’s no different than when I was playing football. We all say we want to be a team, and that may mean I need to get less sacks and take this double team so my linebacker can make more plays. At the end of the day, if we can hoist that championship trophy together, it’s all worth it.

That’s the mentality I approach teamwork from. What I felt on campus was a place that craved alignment, that craved working together, that wants to work together, and that understands if we work together what that looks like one day. When you have that University of Toledo sweatshirt on and you’re in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or Los Angeles, California, or Columbus, Ohio, you’re wearing it with pride and people are stopping you saying, ‘Wow, you guys did this, you guys did that.’ That pride is what I want everybody to feel. I think they already do in some respects, and we want even more of it.

Q: How do you think your experience as a student-athlete prepares you differently than an athletic director who did not play college sports?

A: There’s an irony, too, because a lot of the guys I played with, especially on the offensive line at Wofford, came from Ohio. A lot of them were from St. Xavier High School and some of the other high schools in Ohio. I remember joking around with them about Skyline Chili, and then I marry a girl from Ohio, and now I know more about Ohio than I ever did back then.

Being a student-athlete, you learn a lot of things. You learn to work on a really diverse team with people from all over and how to pull together in one direction to achieve success. That’s what we try to do on any team or organization in life. I think that’s really important. You learn how to push past adversity. I had a lot of adversity as a student-athlete. There were times when I wanted to quit or transfer, and I said, ‘You know what, I just need to give it one more shot and keep pushing.’ And I came out on the other side and was a starter and a leader.

More broadly, though, when you look at the power of sport, I’m huge into that, how sports can bring together a sense of community. It’s unlike anything else in the world. Growing up, I saw cities and towns that in some ways were still somewhat segregated come together on a Friday or Saturday because of sport. I saw people high-fiving and hugging and coming together when maybe the churches were even segregated. But people came together for that Friday night football game in a small town.

The power of sports is really special to me. There’s a Nelson Mandela quote about it that I absolutely love where he talks about that and the power to educate, the power to unite, the power to inspire, and what sport has the ability to do. When you combine that with my student-athlete experience and the lessons that I learned and the access to higher education, that’s really my core why. That’s why I’m in this business and why I wanted to be an AD, to provide that experience for future generations.

Q: You have two high-profile coaches — men’s basketball coach Tod Kowalczyk and football coach Jason Candle — who have semi-uncertain contract situations. How will you go about evaluating those situations?

A: I’m just getting my feet wet. I’ll have a better understanding of where each program is. I need to lean on Dr. Postel and have more conversations about that. I start on May 1. Mike O’Brien is still the AD until then. As we get a better understanding of this transition and what it looks like, as we get a better understanding of the University of Toledo and their athletic programs, I’ll work with Dr. Postel on any recommendations or decisions he needs me to make. As of now, I have not yet made those kinds of decisions. I couldn’t even tell you where the water fountain is, much less the status of those programs.

Contact Kyle Rowland at: krowland@theblade.com, or on Twitter @KyleRowland.