One of the more interesting jobs in college sports right now sits about 20 minutes from my house.
@RHiggins_USF holds the title CEO of Athletics at USF, the first of its kind in the country. He spent two decades running the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, where he helped bring a Super Bowl, a College Football Playoff national championship and multiple Final Fours to the region, and he took over at USF last October. His words for the plan were "all gas and no brakes."
Three pieces stand out to meโฆ
USF has its commercial operations in-house under Bulls Athletic Properties, which the school stood up last summer and Higgins now runs. Ticketing, corporate partnerships, media rights and venue deals all sit under one roof the department controls.
The $348 million on-campus stadium opens in 2027 with 35,000 seats. The Bulls currently play 30 minutes off campus at Raymond James, so the new building hands the program premium seating, parking, concessions and sponsorship inventory it owns outright.
The base underneath all of it is real. Roughly 400,000 living alumni, about three quarters of them within 150 miles, inside one of the strongest business markets in the Southeast.
Own your commercial engine, build the venue that creates inventory, and plant it in a metro full of companies your own alumni are running. Higgins is putting $25,000 of his own salary back into the department every year on top of it.
That combination is going to get copied. Good time to be a Bull.