- September 3, 2026
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In a recent conversation about innovation in college sports, Rob Higgins, CEO of Athletics at the University of South Florida, drops in ice hockey to prove a point.
While USF has a Division III NCAA club hockey team, Higgins is going pro for this theory. USF, he says, channels NHL legend Wayne Gretzky in its strategy on navigating, and succeeding, in the high-stakes, fast-moving world of college sports by going, as Gretzky once said, “where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”
That innovation, to go where the multibillion-dollar industry will be, not where it’s been, crystallizes why the USF board and then-president Rhea Law named Higgins USF’s first-ever CEO of Athletics in September 2025. Not only is the title new for USF, the school is the first major Division I university in the country to transition from having an athletic director to a CEO in charge of sports. In a similar but different move, a few months before USF announced Higgins as CEO of Athletics, Stanford University hired a major company CEO, John Donahue of Nike, as its athletic director.
“This is a really unique time right now,” says Higgins, 47. “College athletics are changing by the second. The current model isn't sustainable, but the chaos creates opportunity.”
That college sports chaos is far-reaching, from millions of dollars in Name, Image and Likeness funds that allow schools and boosters to pay student-athletes to expanding the amount of teams that play in post-season championship brackets to transfer portals. It’s also why leaders in the Power Four conferences hired a CEO last year for the newly-formed College Sports Commission.
In some ways, the CEO of Athletics title at USF, beyond innovation, reflects the realities of overseeing an entity with a $106.4 million budget, some 500 student-athletes and 300 employees that’s in the middle stages of building a $348 million, crown-jewel, on-campus football stadium. “This is a nine-figure enterprise that needs to be run like a fortune 500 company,” Higgins says.
That belief system seems to be catching on. Higgins gets a call at least once a week from other universities, asking about going from AD to CEO, what the steps are, what the benefits and pitfalls are. And in June, the University of Kentucky loosely followed USF in naming J Batt CEO of Champions Blue LLC and UK Athletics Director. Champions Blue, according to the university, is a nonprofit, public entity that’s the holding company for UK Athletics.
“If you are using the old playbook of athletic directors,” says Higgins, “you are really missing out on opportunities.”
The opportunity for Higgins to be in line to be USF’s first-ever Athletics CEO was, in many ways, paved in green and gold (the school’s colors). Higgins’ parents are USF grads and he grew up loving the Bulls and sports. So much so he was a Bulls basketball ball-kid in high school and team manager when he attended USF. He had a full-time job in USF Athletics, managing facilities and events, before he even graduated, in 2001.
“Early on, I understood that this place was special,” Higgins says. “It was a place where you can manifest your dreams. You just have to work for it to happen — not wish for it to happen.”
Higgins left USF, but not the region, in 2004, when he was named executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, which brought dozens of major sporting events to town, including the 2021 Super Bowl, the NCAA Men’s Frozen Four three times and the NCAA Women’s Final Four four times.
But it wasn’t until USF’s graduation ceremony in May 2025, when Higgins was a commencement speaker, when he thought maybe it was time to return to his first love. “And then a month later something opened up,” he says, referring to then-USF Athletic Director Michael Kelly leaving to take the AD post at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Higgins had multiple conversations with USF board leaders, including Will Weatherford, who was the chair then and a driving force behind the CEO of Athletics role, and Mike Griffin, who is chair today. The combination of USF and the CEO role, encompassing a variety of revenue-generating efforts, resonated with Higgins.
"We literally searched the world,” Griffin said at an event in September 2025 to introduce Higgins as CEO. “Sometimes the answer is right in front of you. Rob was the first person and the last person we spoke with. There’s something to be said for putting our arms around our alumni. When your (USF) diploma is hanging on that wall, it means something."
Even with the first ever-CEO moniker, some of the day-to-day work Higgins does, while high-profile, is meat-and-potatoes AD stuff. He meets and greets students, staff, alumni and community leaders. He shakes a lot of hands. He uses his stock lines — like “all gas, no breaks” and “the days of using potential as an excuse or crutch are over” — with the vigor of an enthusiastic USF Sports hypeman. He wears a suit everyday, usually with a white shirt, always with a tie in a USF shade of green.
And over his first year, he’s executed on any leader’s biggest task: hiring other leaders. For Higgins, that meant hiring football coach Brian Hartline and basketball coach Chris Mack. He also named NFL and College Hall of Famer Derrick Brooks COO of USF Athletics and Jason Layton, a 20-year veteran of college sports administration, chief business officer.
All of those new USF Athletics leaders, when introduced to the USF community, talked about their new roles using dreams-come-true language. That can apply to Higgins too, who, in addition to his new CEO role, is a recent cancer survivor — with a familial twist: Higgins was diagnosed in 2024 and went through chemotherapy treatments through the next year, same timeframe as his dad, Jack Higgins, also had, and survived, cancer.
The medical scare led Higgins to an epiphany: don’t delay dreams. “The days are long, but the years are short,” he says, “so if you have an opportunity to follow your dreams, you have to take it.”
