Bryan Blair - Director of Athletics - Staff Directory

Staff Directory

Bryan Blair

Title:
Director of Athletics

Bryan B. Blair, one of college athletics’ most innovative rising leaders, has been named as Syracuse University’s next Director of Athletics. His appointment has been approved by the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees.

Blair is widely regarded as one of the most creative and accomplished leaders in athletics: a builder of championship programs, a generator of innovative revenue strategies and a genuine believer in the transformative power of higher education.

Blair was most recently the vice president and director of athletics at Toledo since 2022. He previously served as the Deputy AD and Chief Operating Officer at Washington State and worked in various roles at Rice, South Carolina and at the NCAA.

In his time at Toledo, he led a bold and comprehensive modernization of Rocket Athletics, marked by record-breaking revenue generation, championship success, strategic brand elevation, and a deep commitment to student-athlete outcomes. In 2024, he was named to the prestigious Sports Business Journal Forty Under 40 list, affirming his standing as one of the most influential and future-ready leaders in sports and entertainment.

The youngest FBS athletic director in the nation at the time of his hire, Blair’s tenure at Toledo coincided with one of the nation’s most dominant competitive runs. The Rockets won 16 Mid-American Conference championships – more than the previous decade combined – since his arrival, and captured the MAC Cartwright Award, based on the criteria of excellence in athletics, academics and citizenship, three consecutive times, and sweeping both the Reese (men’s) and Jacoby (women’s) trophies for the first time in school history in 2023-24.

Academically, Toledo student-athletes set record marks in his tenure, maintaining a cumulative GPA above 3.3 for seven straight semesters. The Rockets earned the MAC Institutional Academic Award in 2023 with a 3.437 GPA and broke the school’s GPA record three times since Blair’s arrival, including a record 3.481 in the Fall of 2025 with every team above 3.2.

Blair hit the ground running in 2022, immediately launching the “Rise Together” strategic plan, which unified stakeholders across campus, athletics and the community around an ambitious, values-driven roadmap for success. The plan included a $75 million facility paster plan, which generated more than $81 million in annual media exposure and $79 million in regional economic impact. The plan included a long-range value proposition study and a reinvention of both revenue strategy and value expression.

Blair is widely recognized as an elite revenue generator and relationship builder. In his time at Toledo, he has grown fundraising by 282 percent since FY22, including securing the second-largest gift in school history. Blair also built the MAC’s most sophisticated NIL ecosystem, securing national partnerships with Powerade and pioneering auto-lease arrangements for student-athletes. He launched “Glass City Live,” the program's first football stadium concert in more than 30 years, drawing 18,000 fans and establishing a new recurring revenue stream. Blair also expanded Toledo’s corporate sponsorship program to lead the MAC and renegotiated the multimedia rights deal.

Blair is a member of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, the NCAA Division I Sports Oversight Committee and the FBS Athletics Directors Association. He holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of South Carolina and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Wofford College, where he was a Division I student-athlete and football team captain. He and his wife, Jenna, have two children, daughter Brielle and son Beau.