LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The last time I talked to Josh Heird, he’d just finished an athletics association meeting and I stayed after to ask him a few questions. It was pretty mundane stuff against the larger backdrop of the past, oh, decade of Louisville athletics. After we were finished and the recording had stopped, he grinned and asked, "Vanilla enough for you?"
I thought at the time — and have the same thought on the day that Heird has been made the school’s official athletics director — removing the "interim" tag from his title, that Louisville could use a little more normal.
Heird is Louisville’s athletics director because he showed the ability to take command of the biggest athletics department soap opera in the nation and turn it into a public access council meeting.
He took over a program with powder-keg potential and has brought the boil down to a simmer. I’m big on considering what might have been. He came into a situation where the school had lost its president and athletics director on the same day. He came into dissatisfaction with football. He came into a men’s basketball scenario with dwindling attendance and a head coach who had just come off a bizarre school-mandated suspension. There were complaints from former players.
Five days before Heird was announced as the interim, I wrote that U of L’s biggest problem was that it is a "bad breaker-upper."
An excerpt: "If you don't wind up in a courtroom after a Louisville breakup, you've done something wrong. If you don't have bruised feelings and a swollen non-disclosure clause, you weren't trying hard enough. If there's not a long trail of tears and accusations and three days' worth of talk-radio rants, you didn't do something right."
Heird has broken that cycle, at least so far. Think about the Chris Mack situation. It could’ve festered. It could’ve lingered into bad feelings and frustration. A federal extortion case. Potential NCAA sanctions. A suspension and a team that was beginning to flounder. Oh yeah, it was headed for Fiascoland.
Instead, Heird announced Jan. 26 that he’d worked out a separation agreement with Mack and that he’d be gone immediately. And that was it. No public recriminations. No splitting of the fan base into factions.
Did he not know where he was working?
It was as deftly maneuvered as anything any of his predecessors could’ve pulled off.
And it was just the beginning. When it came time to hire the new basketball coach, he landed the plane. He brought Kenny Payne home and united a group of disgruntled former players with their old school. He pleased a majority of the fan base.
And he got out of the way and gave Payne, and his message of family, unity and "dream-chasing" center stage.
University of Louisville interim athletics director Josh Heird speaks with interim president Lori Gonzalez before the vote to approve Kenny Payne as new men's basketball coach on March 18, 2022.
On the same day he introduced Payne as coach, he signed women’s basketball coach Jeff Walz to a lifetime contract.
Along the way, he kept his head down, he did the job, he piled up wins, and he avoided drama.
The only drama in the process that resulted in his hire came from supporters who wanted one of his predecessors and mentors, Tom Jurich, hired instead of him. And Heird’s only response to it was to keep his head down, and just do the job.
I think too much of a lot of those people, and of Jurich, to criticize their efforts. Their cause stood little chance from the beginning, and I’m not sure what ultimate goal they thought was realistic. But it's best for U of L and its fans to remember Jurich for what he achieved for the school, particularly its membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Without him, the athletics outlook today would be bleak, with or without the scandals. Some folks might make fun of those efforts, but it’s not worth diminishing the work that Jurich did here.
In its hire of Heird, Louisville cast its vote for less drama – and for more of the kind of quiet excellence Heird has demonstrated in his 6 months on the job. The message from Louisville is that it wants less theater, more production.
"Josh is not our new athletic director simply because he's one of us," interim president Lori Gonzalez said. "He's not our director because he currently holds the interim title. He's not our new athletic director because of his remarkable job performance over the last six months, including visible industry changes, and he's not our new athletic director because our candidate pool was not strong. Josh is our new director because he represents who we are today and who we aspire to be. He has a vision of the limitlessness of U of L athletics. He has built relationships with student athletes, coaches, staffs, donors, alumni and fans. And he has demonstrated time and time again, that not only is he ready to lead our university program, he's ready to elevate it."
Less ego, more "let’s go." Heird is off to a solid start. It’s why the job belongs to him. And maybe, the sideshows can subside.
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