Recounting John Wildhack’s accomplishments as Syracuse director of athletics
John Wildhack stands outside of the National Veterans Resource Center's K.G. Tan Auditorium. Across his 10-year tenure at Syracuse, Wildhack hired coaches for both lacrosse teams, both basketball teams and its football team. Avery Magee | Photo Editor
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Whatever qualifier goes above “dream job,” John Wildhack has worked it for 10 years.
But the dream is over now. After becoming SU’s Director of Athletics in July 2016, Wildhack elected to retire on Feb. 11. Bryan Blair, Toledo’s athletic director, was hired to replace Wildhack on March 11, just a month after Wildhack’s retirement.
“We want to wake this sleeping beast,” Blair said at his introductory press conference.
Compared to his predecessor, Blair enters his role in a much better position to do that. Wildhack took the job after Mark Coyle, SU’s former director of athletics, spent 311 days at Syracuse before bolting for Minnesota. Before Coyle, former Director of Athletics Daryl Gross resigned after an NCAA investigation revealed alleged academic misconduct.
The program Wildhack passed on to Blair is far more steady, after a decade spent restoring stability to SU’s athletic department. Before Wildhack formally leaves, The Daily Orange compiled a list of his five best accomplishments as Syracuse’s director of athletics.
1. Helping restore Syracuse lacrosse
Syracuse and lacrosse are synonymous. That’s why, when given the option to handpick head coaches in both men’s and women’s lacrosse during his tenure, it was imperative Wildhack nail both.
On May 12, 2021, longtime Syracuse men’s lacrosse head coach John Desko said he intended to return to the Orange. Less than a month later, he announced his retirement in a press conference. He spent 46 years with Syracuse, was involved in all 11 of its national championships — although one was vacated — but stepped down at a time when SU was struggling to reclaim its powerhouse status and dealing with the aftermath of Chase Scanlan’s domestic abuse case.
Wildhack couldn’t afford to flub this hire. Syracuse’s status as a lacrosse blue blood was at stake. Luckily, he had Gary Gait coaching SU’s women’s team, a built-in successor for Desko.
It wasn’t an easy rebuild — Gait won just four games in his first year as SU’s head coach — but with the arrival of the vaunted 2022 recruiting class, he’s fully restored Syracuse’s status as one of college lacrosse’s premier programs. In 2025, he led SU back to the Final Four for the first time since 2013, and the Orange have been firmly in the top five throughout most of 2026.
“He is the Michael Jordan of lacrosse,” Wildhack said in 2021 at Gait’s introductory press conference. “Gait is more than capable of leading our men’s program back to the championship level that we all covet.”
On the women’s side, Wildhack chose to replace Gait with former SU attack Kayla Treanor. She led the Orange to three Final Fours from 2021-24 but never got them over the hump. She left Syracuse for Penn State after 2025, a campaign where SU went 10-9 and suffered one of its worst losses in program history against Boston College.
In one of the last coaching hires of his tenure, Wildhack entrusted Florida associate head coach Regy Thorpe — a former Syracuse defender — with reestablishing SU’s standard of success for the women’s team. And thus far, he’s led it to 12 regular season wins and a top-five ranking throughout 2026.
Wildhack, as a parting gift to Syracuse, helped give the Orange two top-five lacrosse teams in his final season at the helm. SU, once again, is a lacrosse school.
2. Hiring Felisha Legette-Jack
Replacing Quentin Hillsman was never going to be easy. It was even more difficult under the circumstances in which Wildhack had to do it.
Hillsman took over a Syracuse program that had never been much of anything in women’s basketball and brought it to the national championship game in the span of a decade. Before Hillsman took the reins, SU had won 20 games just once, and it qualified for the NCAA Tournament three times. It took Hillsman two years to accomplish both of those feats.
So, when Hillsman resigned in August 2021 after allegations of bullying surfaced from his players, Wildhack faced a tall task.
After a year with Vonn Read as an interim head coach, he chose SU alum and Buffalo head coach Felisha Legette-Jack. Her hiring has been an unequivocal success.
Legette-Jack has won at least 20 games in three of her four seasons at Syracuse and made the NCAA Tournament in two of them. She earned Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year honors in the 2023-2024 season, and after a disappointing 2024-25 campaign, discovered Uche Izoje and a variety of transfers to lead SU back to the NCAA Tournament this past season.
Wildhack bet on Legette-Jack. She’s paid that off tenfold.
3. Hiring Fran Brown
Let’s face it. Late into Wildhack’s tenure, Syracuse football hadn’t been a topic of conversation in years.
Under Dino Babers, SU had sunk to a low perhaps worse than rock bottom: irrelevancy. No one spared a single thought for the Orange. Babers had the program in a constant state of five-win purgatory — nothing more, nothing less.
Wildhack needed someone who’d make people remember that Syracuse even had a football team. It’s why, after deciding to cut ties with Babers, Wildhack made possibly the boldest hire of his tenure, selecting Georgia defensive backs coach Fran Brown as Babers’ replacement on Nov. 28, 2023.
Brown hadn’t been anything more than a position coach at the Power Five level, but he’d developed a reputation as one of the top recruiters in the Northeast. He leveraged those connections to restore SU to prominence in 2024. Once he got the job, Brown recruited blue-chip transfers using his New Jersey ties such as Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord and Texas A&M defensive end Fadil Diggs.
Those players helped Brown become the first Syracuse football head coach to win 10 games in his first year since Paul Pasqualoni in 1991. Brown’s first regular season was punctuated with an emphatic 42-38 victory over then-No. 6 Miami, the program’s first top-10 win since 2017.
The jury’s still out on his tenure — Brown’s squad won just three games in 2025 — but the program needed an injection of life. Brown definitely provided it.
4. Renovating the Dome
Many athletic directors had tried — and failed — to get renovations of the JMA Wireless Dome off the ground since Jake Crouthamel’s departure in 2004, The D.O. reported in 2020.
Gross couldn’t. Coyle couldn’t. But Wildhack did.
Syracuse’s men’s lacrosse team has repeatedly said the Dome is indisputably the best Division I lacrosse venue. It’s easy to imagine they’re not the only team on campus that feels the same way about the stadium.
Cultivating that environment wouldn’t have been possible without the renovations Wildhack helped spearhead. The $118-million project, completed in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, included the four-panel video board hanging over the stadium turf, a full air conditioning system, accessibility measures and revamped concession stands and bathrooms.
The Dome has, quite literally, never been better. You can thank Wildhack for that.
5. Leading SU men’s basketball into NIL era
Consider this spot a catch-all placement for Wildhack’s decisions regarding Syracuse’s men’s basketball program over his 10-year tenure. There were a lot of them, and their success can be debated endlessly. That’s why this only occupies the No. 5 spot on this list.
If the conversation is about importance, the decisions Wildhack made regarding Syracuse’s men’s basketball program were arguably the most consequential choices of his tenure. He was tasked with replacing longtime head coach Jim Boeheim after his retirement in March 2023.
When Adrian Autry, Boeheim’s in-house successor, failed to reach March Madness for three consecutive seasons, it fell on Wildhack to replace him. He obviously wasn’t alone in selecting Siena head coach Gerry McNamara as Autry’s successor, but after McNamara was formally introduced as SU’s head coach, Wildhack showed his words still hold weight.
“When I met with our team last week, I was very direct and candid when I told them why I hired Gerry,” Wildhack said at McNamara’s introductory press conference, before correcting himself to say it was a collaborative process.
After the U.S. Supreme Court opened college athletics to the world of name, image and likeness money in 2021, he helped SU’s athletic department revitalize its fundraising efforts. The 2024-25 campaign featured lackluster financial support, which forced SU to settle for mid-major transfers such as Jaquan Carlos and Jyáre Davis.
But Wildhack helped level up its NIL game the following season. The Daily Orange previously reported that Syracuse had about $8 million to spend on its 2025-26 roster, building arguably the most talented team of Autry’s tenure. He laid the groundwork for Blair’s introduction of the One Orange Alliance, a third-party NIL entity designed to support SU Athletics.
The results are yet to match that investment, and the Orange still haven’t truly established themselves as one of the stronger financial programs in the ACC. But for better or worse, in the NIL era, Wildhack is the architect that constructed the future of Syracuse basketball.
