Hart’s hiring doesn’t mean the end of Mal Moore
Dave Hart has not been hired to be the Alabama athletics-director-in-waiting.
I repeat: Dave Hart is not coming back to Tuscaloosa to be Mal Moore’s replacement.
That’s the unofficial official word from people in the know who don’t want to be known. They are adamant about that.
The hiring of Dave Hart as Executive Director of Athletics, answering only to the athletics director, does not signal a coming end to the Moore era.
Not that the 58-year-old wouldn’t be a good choice. He is a 1971 graduate of Alabama, having played basketball for C.M. Newton. And at Florida State, Hart was responsible for broadening the vision of a football-focused athletic department to the point where FSU finished in the top 15 nationally in all-sports rankings for the last two years.
But Dave Hart, so the word went out, is not going to be the next athletics director at Alabama.
Never mind that Hart was former Alabama President Andrew Sorensen’s first choice as athletics director in the fall of 1999. Sorensen and Hart were scheduled to meet in the Atlanta airport, but when reporters got wind of the meeting and it became public, Sorensen backed off and wound up promoting Moore.
Word on the street at the time was that the “good ol’ boy” network made sure Sorensen’s trip didn’t work out; such is the power behind Moore.
al.com
7/31/08