Greg Byrne’s promise when he was introduced as Alabama’s athletics director in 2017 was, “We can never be complacent. We will do everything we can to compete for championships.”
Byrne has largely delivered on that promise, thanks in no small part to the monumental hires he has made as athletics director.
Perhaps the most notable of those hires was bringing in Nate Oats from Buffalo to replace Avery Johnson as the men’s basketball head coach in 2019.
The hire was a watershed moment for the history of Alabama basketball as it ushered in unprecedented success in both the regular season and the NCAA Tournament.
Under Oats, the program is 145-63, a 69.7 winning percentage. That winning percentage puts Oats’s tenure first among coaches who coached at least five seasons in Tuscaloosa.
Oats has led Alabama to the NCAA Tournament every year except for 2020, when the tournament was cancelled, including twice as a No. 2 seed and once as a No. 1 seed.
With two Elite Eight appearances and one Final Four to show for his time at Alabama, the hire of Oats has evidently been one of the most significant that Alabama’s athletic department has ever made.
“I guess we’ve won enough to stick around here,” Oats mused in a recent press conference.
The success of Byrne’s coaching hires, however, goes far beyond the men’s basketball team.
In 2022, Byrne was tasked with hiring a new gymnastics coach, a high-pressure job given that Alabama ranks fifth in all time NCAA gymnastics championships, and as such has high expectations to perform year-in and year-out.
He hired Ashley Johnston, under whom the gymnastics team is currently on the tail of two nationals appearances and three straight top-10 finishes, continuing the dynastic legacy of Alabama gymnastics.
When it came to finding a baseball coach to replace Brad Bohannon, on the other hand, Byrne needed to find someone who could steer the program into success it hadn’t historically experienced.
He picked Rob Vaughn, former Maryland head coach, to take on the task. Though Vaughn only has two seasons as Alabama’s coach under his belt, his tenure has been marked by a notable improvement in the program’s recruitment of elite high school talent, finishing with the eighth-ranked recruiting class in 2025 per Perfect Game.
“Why Alabama?” Vaughn asked when introduced as the baseball coach in 2023. “You look at that and you see elite-level coaches. You see the ability to win. You see the ability for these young people to get drafted and be everything that they wanna be a part of.”
Though the team has yet to make a deep tournament run under the new coaching staff, continued recruiting at a high level will open the door for Alabama to start competing with the other top teams in the SEC and the nation.
Perhaps the most famous of Byrne’s hires was picking Kalen DeBoer to replace Nick Saban upon Saban’s retirement in 2024.
Midway through only his second season, it’s too early to make a final judgment on DeBoer’s time as Alabama’s head coach, but there have been some promising markers that suggest Byrne didn’t make a poor choice.
With 20 games coached at Alabama, DeBoer is 7-1 against ranked opponents, including 2-0 against Georgia. While some fans have argued those wins are belied by losses to unranked teams, the team’s performance against top opponents has helped to continue the legacy left by Saban of constantly showing up in big games.
DeBoer’s recruiting ability was in question more than his coaching ability when he was hired, however, and he has answered those questions well while he’s been in Tuscaloosa, finishing his first season with the third-ranked class in the nation and currently having the seventh-ranked class per Rivals industry rankings.
*Editor’s Note: A factual error has been corrected in the fifth paragraph. Nate Oats’s coaching record did not include this past season’s results.
