How good is the South Alabama AD job?

Friday was Joel Erdmann’s last day as South Alabama’s athletic director. After 17 years — the longest tenure of any AD in the Sun Belt — the university named its athletics administration building in his honor this week. The man who built South Alabama athletics from nothing deserves every bit of that.

Erdmann led South Alabama into its FBS era and made sure the Jaguars had the facilities to compete when they got there. The job he just left is worth examining — because the next person who walks into that building is inheriting something real, and something complicated.

The Erdmann ledger

Erdmann arrived in July 2009 as the fourth athletic director in school history. The Jaguars kicked off their inaugural football season a month later. He built the program from scratch — no stadium, no infrastructure, no tradition. Seventeen years later, the ledger reads: $100 million in facility projects, Hancock Whitney Stadium, 42 Sun Belt Conference championships, 53 NCAA postseason appearances, six Bubas Cups and a department that posted its highest cumulative GPA in history at 3.179. Nearly 75 percent of student-athletes earned a 3.0 or higher this spring.

University president Jo Bonner put it plainly on Instagram Friday: Erdmann’s leadership “extended far behind the scenes when no one was looking — from his directing game-day traffic and monitoring stadium lines to their spending holidays cleaning out dugouts.”

That is not a CEO quote. That is a description of a builder — someone who swept the floors because nobody else was going to.

The football trajectory tells the story. Joey Jones launched the program and went 52-50 across 10 seasons. Steve Campbell went 9-26 in three years and was fired. Kane Wommack arrived and went 10-3 in 2022 — a program record — followed by 7-6 and the school’s first bowl victory in 2023. Then Wommack left for Alabama’s defensive coordinator job. Major Applewhite took over, went 7-6 and won a bowl in his first year. He went 4-8 in 2025.

Beyond football, Richie Riley led men’s basketball to a 21-win season and the Sun Belt regular-season title in 2024-25. Baseball made the NCAA tournament in 2021. The department earned its Bubas Cups across the board.

Erdmann did all of that in a market without a built-in recruiting pipeline, without a television contract that funds itself and without the donor base that schools like Appalachian State and Louisiana have cultivated over decades.

What the data says

Athletic Director U’s Power Index — a peer survey of sitting ADs and executive-level administrators who currently hold or aspire to Sun Belt AD jobs — ranked South Alabama ninth out of 12 schools in overall desirability, with a 4.16 rating on a 7-point scale. The survey was conducted in 2022.

That ranking deserves context, because it reveals both the opportunity and the challenge.

South Alabama ranked sixth in quality of life. Mobile is a real city with a low cost of living, a Gulf Coast lifestyle and a university president in Bonner who clearly values athletics. That matters to candidates with families. It matters to recruits. Facilities ranked seventh — a direct reflection of the $100 million Erdmann invested. Men’s basketball success potential ranked sixth, which tracks with what Riley has built.

Everything else landed in the bottom third.

Donor support: eighth. Leadership alignment: eighth. Brand perception: ninth. Football success potential: ninth out of 10 football-playing schools, with only Louisiana Monroe rated lower. Non-revenue success potential: ninth — despite six Bubas Cups in the trophy case. Power 5 AD potential: ninth, with a 3.84 rating, meaning peers do not view the job as a springboard to a bigger chair.

Read those numbers together and a portrait emerges. The South Alabama AD job has real assets — location, facilities, a president who cares — but peers in the industry see a department that struggles to generate the financial support needed to compete consistently. The gap between what Erdmann built on the field and how the industry perceives the job off it is the central tension the next AD inherits.

The new math

The South Alabama AD job in 2009 required building programs. The South Alabama AD job in 2026 requires funding them.

NIL and the transfer portal already reshaped the talent market. NCAA revenue sharing, which took effect in the 2025-26 academic year, added a direct financial obligation on top of it. South Alabama launched a “Loyal, Strong and Faithful” fund in April 2025 specifically to address that burden. That tells you the old fundraising model was not going to carry it alone.

The pattern at South Alabama mirrors what is happening across every Group of 6 program: you develop players, they get good and the portal gives them a path to a bigger school with more NIL money. Consistency becomes almost impossible when you cannot retain the talent you develop. Wommack builds a 10-win team, then leaves for the SEC. The next coach inherits a roster that was built to win now, not to sustain.

That cycle is harder to break when you rank eighth in donor support and ninth in football potential among your own conference peers. The ADU data was collected before revenue sharing existed. The financial pressure has only increased since then.

The search

Bonner is taking his time.

“I’ve personally been contacted by at least 10 different athletics directors or associate ADs from other universities who’ve basically said, ‘if you are to move forward with a search, we would like to be considered,’” Bonner told AL.com. “So there won’t be a shortage of candidates.”

He cited provost Andi Kent’s hiring philosophy: “It’s better to have a vacancy than to wish you had a vacancy.”

Daniel McCarthy, the deputy AD who has been at South Alabama since 2008, is running the department on an interim basis. Bonner said the school should “know something by early fall.”

Ten-plus candidates calling unprompted is a real signal. People want this job. South Alabama is a Sun Belt founding member with on-campus facilities, a stadium that opened in 2020 and an institutional alignment that the ADU data, ironically, undersells. Bonner is a former congressman who has made athletics a visible priority. That matters.

But the next AD walks into a department that ranked in the bottom third of its own conference in seven of nine categories measured by peers — and that was before revenue sharing added a new line item to the budget. The expectation is not just to maintain what Erdmann built. The expectation is to elevate it in an era that punishes programs without deep pockets.

South Alabama can compete. Erdmann proved that. The question is whether the next AD can sustain it when the cost of competing has fundamentally changed.

It is a good job. It is also a lunch-pail job. Bring your hard hat.