This one's about as low-drama as an AD hire gets, which is exactly the point. South Alabama didn't run a splashy national search, didn't fly in candidates from bigger conferences, didn't drag this out all offseason. They just handed the keys to the guy who's already been running the department in the shadows for years.
Pete Thamel broke the promotion, laying out McCarthy's full timeline at South Alabama.
The backstory here matters. Dr. Joel Erdmann, the longest-tenured AD in the Sun Belt, announced his retirement this spring after roughly 17 years running South Alabama athletics — he was feted at Hancock Whitney Stadium in late May before officially stepping away. McCarthy slid into the interim chair on June 1, and by all accounts the transition period was basically a formality. He wasn't some outside hire cramming for the job; he'd been South Alabama's deputy athletic director since 2017 and had been on staff since 2008, meaning he's touched nearly every corner of the department for the better part of two decades.
Before Mobile, McCarthy cut his teeth at Richmond and Mercer, so this isn't a resume built entirely inside one building. But the fact that South Alabama had a ready-made successor sitting one office down from Erdmann says a lot about how the department has planned its succession — no scramble, no outside consultants needed, just promote the guy who already knows where every budget line and booster relationship lives.
Why it matters for a program like South Alabama: continuity is currency for a Sun Belt school trying to keep climbing. The Jaguars have been building momentum in football and across their sports under Erdmann's tenure, and swapping in a total outsider right as that trajectory is trending up would've been a real risk. Instead, McCarthy gets to keep every relationship, every fundraising pitch and every coaching hire plan moving without a reset button. Expect the story going forward to be less about a honeymoon period and more about whether he can keep the momentum Erdmann built actually building.