TUCSON — Being the son of an athletic director, Greg Byrne has been around the business side of college athletics since he went on a Walkathon at New Mexico where his dad, Bill Byrne, was the executive director of the Lobo Club.
Now AD at Texas A&M, Bill Byrne is watching his son resurrect an Arizona athletic department in dire need of new facilities, not to mention a football coach.
“My dad doesn’t give a lot of advice,” said Byrne, 41. “He’s always there when I want to call and talk to him. And, amazingly, he calls and asks me stuff sometimes.”
In this coaching search, Byrne isn’t soliciting any advice. He’s a one-man search committee. It’s to the point where if a coach leaks word that he’s a candidate, he’s no longer a candidate.
The method worked well at his previous post. At Mississippi State, Byrne hired Florida offensive coordinator Dan Mullen in 2009, and last year the 9-4 Bulldogs had only their second winning record in 12 years.
Arizona hired Byrne in May 2010, and he has already spearheaded a drive to put a $7 million video board in Arizona Stadium. There will be a groundbreaking this spring on a $72 million football complex behind the north end zone.
None of it matters if he hires the wrong coach. Speculation crawls across the Arizona football landscape like sagebrush in the desert.
ESPN’s Mark May recently told a Phoenix radio station that Boise State coach Chris Petersen is at the top of the list. It makes sense on some levels. Byrne and Petersen worked together at Oregon in the late 1990s when Petersen was the Ducks’ receivers coach and Byrne worked in athletic development.
They have remained close, and Byrne tried luring Petersen to Mississippi State. Byrne likely is undeterred that the last two Boise State head coaches who jumped to a BCS conference, Dirk Koetter to Arizona State and Dan Hawkins to Colorado, failed.
Petersen has shown no interest in any other school, but one wonders if the loss of 25 seniors and Boise State’s unsettled conference situation could make him reassess.
Another possibility is former Oregon coach Mike Bellotti, the Ducks’ offensive coordinator while Bill Byrne was Oregon’s AD. Now an analyst for ESPN, Bellotti has denied that it’s a done deal.
He has repeatedly said that, at 60, he would need an ideal situation to return. He briefly looked at the Colorado job last year, and Arizona’s facilities aren’t any better.
Mike Leach’s high-flying passing attack would fit perfectly in the Pac-12, but his firing from Texas Tech has left him too toxic, observers believe. Arizona grad Chuck Cecil, let go by the Tennessee Titans after last season, is considered too much like the coach Byrne fired. Mike Stoops was a longtime assistant with no head coaching experience.
Recruiting is already feeling the effects. A.J. Hilliard, a three-star linebacker out of Klein Oak High School in Texas, decommitted two weeks ago and is leaning toward TCU, although he also visited Colorado, Washington and California.
Despite a team that’s 2-7 (1-6 Pac-12) going into Saturday’s game at Colorado, Byrne has plenty to sell. The only BCS conference school whose football offices are in the basketball arena will move into the new north end football complex.
The community can’t wait. Arizona is the only school in the league, other than new members Utah and Colorado, that never has played in a Rose Bowl.
“One thing I love about the U of A is other than minor-league baseball, we’re the only game in town,” Byrne said. “Just today we had three front-page articles in sports. Almost every night on the evening news we’re being talked about. There’s a lot of talk and passion right here in a community of almost a million people.”
