Marshall is searching for its next AD as the institution and Christian Spears agreed in April 2025 to not renew his contract that expires in March 2026. Marshall has once again tapped CarrSports to help with the search as they helped lead the search that led to Spears accepting the position in 2022. If you are interested in the AD opening, I’d encourage you to look at the HEA Briefing I put together for the political landscape of the position.

Marshall football had a great season in 2024 and won the Sun Belt title, only to see their head coach, Charles Huff, leave for Sun Belt foe Southern Miss. Marshall had to pay a large fine for withdrawing from their bowl game after Huff’s departure led several players into the transfer portal. Huff and Marshall had agreed before the season to not extend his contract. Both Huff and Spears spoke highly of each other after the departure and it makes you wonder if it was a decision outside of the AD’s control.

Based on these contract situations, it will be interesting to see if sitting ADs or even high-level deputies will avoid the opportunity. Either way, the next AD will likely need political and business-like IQ to match the expectations of its business background president, Brad Smith, who served as the CEO of Intuit from 2008 to 2018.

Home Run Hire

This AD opening seems like the hardest to predict candidates or at least where they will come from outside of one name: Jeff O’Malley. The VP/AD at Lamar University, O’Malley served as a top administrator at Marshall Athletics for 20 years and was the interim AD during Covid-19 and the move to the Sun Belt Conference before Spears was ultimately hired. O’Malley accepted the position at Lamar shortly after Spears came on board.

O’Malley is the obvious home run hire if Marshall can convince him to return. President Smith is a Marshall alum and technically hired Spears, but it was around the early start of his presidency. Based on the research I did on Marshall for my HEA Briefing, Smith comes off as a passionate alum who appreciates the history of his institution. It does make you wonder if there is regret in not keeping O’Malley when he was up for the job in 2022. Marshall’s two athletic directors before Spears were here for several years before taking retirement. Smith might want to find that type of long-term steady leadership again in someone that spent 20 years with the Thundering Herd.

If they do want O’Malley, it might not be easy to get him to come back. Things seem to be going well for him at Lamar, and O’Malley and Lamar’s president, Dr. Jaime Taylor, worked together at Marshall for several years. Taylor was the provost at Marshall up until becoming president at Lamar in November 2021, just a few months before Spears was announced as the Marshall AD. The opportunity President Taylor gave O’Malley to become the AD shortly after being passed over after 20 years of service to Marshall might make it difficult to leave.

I really liked this quote by President Taylor when O’Malley was hired at Lamar: “Jeff O’Malley is a trusted collaborator who understands it takes all facets of a university to support student-athletes. He established very positive relationships with faculty and with academic affairs at Marshall University and has an absolutely stellar reputation for ensuring student-athletes are successful in the classroom as well as on the field of play.”

AD Hiring Trends

Since there aren’t any other obvious candidates, I decided to research recent AD hires at the same membership level of Marshall. I have been putting together an AD hiring spreadsheet for my dissertation and that guides me in some of my thought processes.

Sun Belt + Conference USA + The American AD Hires Since 2020

There were 14 previous AD hires between 2020 and 2025 at the time of this writing within the Sun Belt, Conference USA and The American. Five of those 14 AD hires were deputy ADs at autonomy/power schools, including the 2022 hire of Christian Spears. Other good ones that seem to have worked out so far were Coastal Carolina’s Chance Miller (Deputy AD at South Carolina), Georgia Southern’s Jared Benko (Deputy AD at Miss State and now Auburn Deputy AD), and FIU’s Scott Carr (Deputy AD at then non-power UCF). This should give CarrSports and Marshall confidence that there are still good options to not feel like you have to bring in a sitting AD.

Three of those 14 hires were internal selections that look like good moves today, with Don Coryell at Texas State, Jared Mosley at North Texas, and Chris Davis at Georgia Southern. I don’t foresee Marshall going with an internal person, but it might be further confidence to try and bring O’Malley back who brings you that institutional knowledge.

Just two of the 14 hires were sitting FCS athletic directors with Matt Roan going to James Madison after leading Eastern Kentucky and Ryan Ivey taking over at Louisiana Tech after leading Stephen F. Austin. Marshall’s institutional profile is similar to several FCS schools, which makes me wonder if another sitting FCS athletic director will be the choice (Lamar is a FCS school).

FBS Non-Power AD Hires in 2024 and 2025

I also looked at more recent AD hiring trends in the FBS outside of the power schools. There were 16 FBS non-power AD hires in 2024 and so far in 2025. Notably, five of those hires were previous ADs in their immediate prior position, including three from the FCS level: Andrew Goodrich, to Akron from Gardner-Webb; and both Matt Roan and Ryan Ivey mentioned above. I did not originally expect that almost a third of those AD hires were previous ADs. And it would be a third if you count recently hired Chris Pezman, who had not been with a department since Houston parted ways with him in June 2024.

Nine of the 16 hires were senior level athletic department staffers. Seven of the nine were deputies, one was just listed as COO and the other was an executive senior associate AD for operations. Five of the nine were from autonomy institutions (3 SEC, 1 from both the Big 12 and ACC) and three of the four from non-power schools were from the Sun Belt.

Final Collected Thoughts

• I think Jeff O’Malley is so obvious of a pick that it won’t happen. He likely will be at Lamar long-term since he has previous working experience with the president. This would be a home run if Marshall brought him back to Huntington though.
• Internal options seem out of the question based on the current structure and situation with an outgoing athletic director who hired some of them.
• Based on the position profile created by CarrSports, I don’t see an outsider coming into higher education to lead Marshall despite the president coming from the business world.
• The Sun Belt is full of competitive and like-minded schools so I do wonder if the next AD comes from another SBC school. If so, I could see Brandon Cunningham, Deputy AD for Development an Revenue Generation at Arkansas State, being a candidate at Marshall.
  • Cunningham has been at Arkansas State since 2022 and has worked high-level positions at WVU, NC State, and Louisville.
  • I wonder if not being selected at Arkansas State in their recent AD opening might cause him to be actively looking for other jobs.
    • *Update 6/30/25: Cunningham shared on LinkedIn that he is officially done at A-State and taking a position outside of college athletics.
• I think Marshall will ultimately want a sitting AD to take over, likely meaning a FCS AD is their most likely choice. Who that is other than the name I’ve mentioned several times already, I have no idea.
• The recent AD hires at the level of Marshall seem to indicate there’s 1 in 3 chance they hire a sitting AD.
• The same math shows about an equal chance of it being a power-4 deputy or a FBS non-power deputy.