Josh Brooks’ Georgia legacy may be about something other than football

ATHENS, Ga. — Nobody cares about the other sports. It’s all about football. Nobody cares about softball, track and field, tennis, volleyball or any of those other teams. As long as football is going well, and at Georgia it is, the money is rolling in, the fans are happy, and the people who run the athletic department can coast through their day, only stopping to count their money. Because nobody cares about the other sports, at least that’s what some people think.

Josh Brooks, however, does care.

That’s why, sitting in a near-empty meeting room, the Georgia athletic director pulled out his phone to show off color-coded standings. It’s for the Learfield Cup, the ranking that determines the all-sports prowess of NCAA schools. Not just football, but softball, track and field, tennis, volleyball, basketball, baseball … all of them. Brooks checks it every day. Sometimes every hour. Or every minute.

“I’ll be talking with other ADs, stressing over the Learfield standings, and they’ll laugh at me, ‘Oh you won a football championship,’” Brooks said. “Yes that’s great, and, of course, we want to win a championship in football and what people would consider the bigger sports. I’m wired that I just want to win in everything we do.”

And that, rather than football, may prove to be Brooks’ legacy at Georgia.

He got the job at the beginning of 2021, promoted when Greg McGarity retired after 10 years. There’s plenty that goes into being an athletic director: managing and raising money, facility enhancements, avoiding NCAA scandals, and navigating all the new issues in college sports, like NIL.

But the public perception of an AD still revolves largely around coaching hires. Brooks inherited his most high-profile one: Kirby Smart, who barring something unforeseen will be at Georgia for a long time. The football program basically runs itself, with Smart overseeing a staff of about 150 coaches, trainers, student assistants and other staffers. Brooks still oversees the program, but he knows he can devote more time to the other 20 sports under his purview.

Can’t wait to get started! pic.twitter.com/pCZIA9pMqr

— Georgia Baseball (@BaseballUGA) June 15, 2023

And that’s where he has been most busy. In just more than two years, Brooks has replaced the head coach of 11 teams:

Three of them were retirements, and each time, Brooks promoted from within:

• Longtime men’s and women’s swimming coach Jack Bauerle stepped down last year. He was replaced by two people: Neil Versfeld for the men’s team and Stefanie Williams Moreno for the women’s team.

• Softball coach Lu Harris-Champer retired after making the College World Series in 2021. Associate assistant Tony Baldwin was elevated to the top job.

• Women’s tennis coach Jeff Wallace retired after this past season and assistant Drake Bernstein was promoted.

Two others left without being fired:

• Petros Kyprianou, who had won a team national title in 2019, did not renew his contract amid a dispute about Georgia not building a new track facility. Brooks said the timing wasn’t right; he’s now committed to building one under Caryl Smith Gilbert, hired away from Southern California the day after she won her own national title in 2021.

• Joni Taylor, women’s basketball coach, took a slight raise to go to Texas A&M after the 2021-22 season. Brooks hired Katie Abraham-Henderson from Central Florida.

And Brooks fired three other head coaches:

• Women’s soccer, where Billy Lesesne was let go after five seasons. Brooks hired Keidane McAlpine from Southern California, and he coached the team to the NCAA Tournament in his first season.

• Men’s basketball: Tom Crean came to Georgia as a ballyhooed hire in 2018 but lasted only four seasons, the last of those being one of the worst in modern Georgia history. Mike White was hired away from Florida and guided the team to a 16-16 record this past season.

• Baseball, where Brooks seriously considered keeping Scott Stricklin for an 11th season but ultimately decided a change was needed.

That brings us to where Brooks was Tuesday, in what used to be the football team meeting room and is now used mainly for news conferences. Brooks formally introduced Wes Johnson as the baseball coach, a much-traveled assistant (including a stint as the Minnesota Twins’ pitching coach) who is being charged with invigorating a Georgia baseball program that has fallen behind its SEC peers. Still, the decision could have gone either way with Stricklin, who Brooks liked and respected for doing things the right way.

“But in this business, sometimes it’s just time for a change,” Brooks said.

When Johnson was hired — at an annual salary of $700,000, just above the $600,500 that Stricklin was earning — national college baseball reporter Kendall Rogers tweeted that he was “told throughout the process that UGA was unwilling to pay premium dollar for a head coach.”

Brooks was asked about that.

“All due respect to him, that’s his opinion. I was the one in charge of the search, I know what we did and didn’t do,” Brooks said. “It was about finding the best candidate. I zeroed in on a couple candidates I really liked and made an offer. It wasn’t about whatever he was claiming.”

Still, money is a factor. Georgia, like every SEC program, has a lot of money coming in every year, and the football program’s success means donations are high. But that’s football money, so there’s only so much of it that’s going to be redirected to other sports. That hasn’t stopped fans of notable other teams from wondering how it should be.

When Stegeman Coliseum had to be closed this spring because of a falling roof tile, it was suggested the school should just build a new arena. But the decision was made to instead fix the roof and continue with renovations to the arena, which houses both basketball programs, gymnastics and volleyball.

Similarly, Brooks thinks renovations and improvements to baseball’s Foley Field are the right way to go, rather than building a new stadium.

But the track program is getting a new facility, or at least the process has begun to build the facility near where the softball and soccer complexes are, near off-campus on Milledge Avenue. That’s not about favoring track, Brooks said; it’s about what makes the most sense, pointing to the track program having a small space in its current area, which eventually will become a practice field for football. So a double win.

“Facilities are a business decision at the end of the day. It’s a value proposition when you think about it,” Brooks said. “Stegeman’s in great shape. The roof’s in great shape; we have a great repair (going on). I think when we reopen it, everyone’s going to see and be really impressed with the look. … You’ve got to balance out that Stegeman has great bones, and you can maybe put, I don’t know, $20, $30, $40 million into it — I’m just throwing out numbers — versus a $300 million new facility.”

Georgia has long seemed to need a master plan for facilities instead of jumping from one project to another and in the end wasting money. (Witness the millions spent in 2010 on a small-scale indoor facility for football, knocked down five years later to build the one it should have built in the first place.) Brooks has declined to release an official master plan, but he confirmed that he has had one in his head, with building a new track facility off Milledge part of it. Brooks said he has been hesitant to tell everyone the plan in order to be flexible in case things have to change.

(Such as NIL becoming the new wave, meaning donations for facilities may be dwindling. In Georgia’s case, it has gotten its major football projects checked off, just in time.)

Football pays the bills. But it’s the other sports where Brooks grants his legacy may rest.

“I put that pressure on myself, yes,” Brooks said. “That’s one of the first responsibilities of an AD — there’s many — but one of the primary responsibilities of an AD is hiring head coaches. A lot of times, an AD is going to be judged by the coaches they hire. I can’t ignore that fact.

“But I look back on the history of ADs and know not everyone’s batted 1.000, and sometimes good hires in good situations just sometimes don’t work out. But I do know that when we hire someone, or anyone we have, we’re going to put everything we have into it and give them every resource we have to be successful.”

Where things stand now: Georgia is projected to finish eighth in the Learfield Cup, which would be its best finish since 2018 and tied for the school’s best finish in 17 years. But some of it is cumulative: 17 of the 21 Georgia sports this year finished in the top 20. Baseball and men’s basketball were exceptions. Gymnastics, once a power sport at Georgia, has receded, but Brooks has stood by coach Courtney Kupets-Carter, citing her recruiting. And he points to the upward trajectory in gymnastics, men’s basketball and, he hopes, baseball.

The standings may look good. But the feel could be better. It could be at the level Georgia was in the 1990s, when it was dominating the all-sports standings. That was when it wasn’t dominating in football. But Brooks believes the school can do both.

“The ultimate goal for me is to win the Learfield Cup,” Brooks said. “We want to be successful in everything we do. We would never be a program where we say we’re going to pick four sports and go be good at those four sports. We take pride in being deep across the board.”

(Photo of Josh Brooks, left, Stetson Bennett and Kirby Smart: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)