Greg Byrne's whirlwind week culminated with a short walk to the podium Thursday afternoon.
The news conference announcing him as Alabama's next athletics director was the first step in a new era for the athletics department. The 45-year old is only the second since the Bear Bryant era who doesn't have direct connections to the Crimson Tide football program.
Byrne came up through the administrative ranks, from Oregon and Oregon State to Kentucky, Mississippi State and eventually Arizona. He's well known in the collegiate athletics realm, but maybe not a household name among casual observers.
The job in Tuscaloosa won't officially begin until March 1 when Bill Battle's retirement begins. In the interim, take a look at a few stories, facts and philosophies that helped shape the next leader of Alabama athletics.
-- Byrne's first SEC job was as an associate AD at Kentucky. Famous Wildcat basketball equipment manager Bill Keightley knocked on his door one day and told him his office was once occupied by ex-Kentucky football coach Bear Bryant. He too went on to work at Alabama.
-- As a young athletic administrator, Byrne got frustrated during his time with Kentucky. He actually left the business and spent a year working at a start-up company called CaseLogistix. Byrne said Thursday he wasn't very patient at the time. Everything had to happen fast. He was a finalist for the AD job at Utah State, didn't get it and it bothered him. So he went to the company that sold software to the legal industry. "It was the best thing I ever did because I was miserable. I did not enjoy going to work every day." A year later, Mississippi State called and he returned to collegiate athletics as an associate AD in charge of fundraising. He'd be AD within two years.
-- Byrne is the first Alabama AD to use Twitter. His account, launched in May 2009, has more than 10,000 posts and nearly 38,000 followers.
-- Byrne talks to good friend and new Florida AD Scott Stricklin "three to four times a week." They worked together at Mississippi State and Stricklin replaced Byrne as AD when he went to Arizona in 2010.
-- In a related matter, Byrne said there were media reports about his candidacy for the Florida AD job last year, but he was never offered the job that ultimately went to Stricklin.
-- In Byrne's Arizona office was a report he wrote in fourth grade. The assignment was to write about your future career. And while classmates dreamed being firefighters, lawyers or something even bigger, Byrne penned his paper about being an assistant athletics director and AD. His father, Bill Byrne was the AD at Oregon, Nebraska and Texas A&M before retiring in 2012.
-- He learned an important lesson about being a public figure as a child. His dad was the AD at Oregon when a fan wrote a critical letter to the local paper. They should fire that AD who didn't have the big game on TV. The young Byrne was angry. "I remember my dad saying 'Son, if you want to be an athletics director, you have to have a thick skin. You have to let that go.' And that stayed with me my entire life."
-- After growing a few years older, Greg Byrne got a job as a ball boy at Oregon football games. He recalled meeting an icon who would go on to shape sports in America for decades to come. At halftime of a home game, the teenaged Byrne ran up to the stadium's lone luxury suite to eat. In the corner, he saw a man off in the corner wearing the brand new basketball shoes worn by rookie Michael Jordan. "Who's the guy with the scruffy beard and mustache?" he remembered asking his mom. "Well," she said, "that's Phil Knight, the founder of Nike."
-- "I want to make it very clear how much I love the Alabama football uniform," Byrne said when asked about branding.
-- The Arizona program Byrne just left is the closest you get to an SEC fan base, he said. Wildcat fans would make up 60-75 percent of the fans at the annual basketball tournament in Las Vegas.