Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne is often using those hands to Tweet. Photo by Mark Evans, TucsonCitizen.com
Arizona Wildcats athletic director Greg Byrne takes his social media seriously — which means he can also have a little fun along with breaking news and pitches to buy tickets — and now everyone should know it.
FootballScoop.com ranked the Top 10 Athletics Directors You Need to Follow on Twitter, putting the UA’s top cat at No. 1.
Their reasons:
“There are multiple. He is No. 1, after all. There was the time he trolled an Arizona State fan, or the time he announced the hiring of Rich Rodriguez over Twitter, or the time he invited two fans to take part in the Arizona football pre-game, or the time he agreed over Twitter to speak to an LSU sports management class via Skype. If that’s not enough, he has Ron Swanson as his avatar.”
The twittering runs in the family. His father, retired athletic director Bill Byrne, still fires away on social media and comes in at No. 4 on the list.
Greg Byrne’s Twitter page had about 15,550 followers as of mid-afternoon.
The announcement of the Rodriguez hire in November 2011 was his social media breakthrough, believed to the first major college football coaching hire announced via Twitter.
Byrne knew he wanted to break the news on Twitter, but he credited his wife, Regina, with improving the idea.
“We were flying into the Detroit airport to pick up Coach (Rich) Rodriguez and his family and I asked her, ‘What should I put in the tweet?’” Byrne once told me. “And it was her idea to use a picture.”
Regina snapped a picture of her husband with the Rodriguez family, and Byrne tweeted: “And the new Arizona football coach and his family is…….” with a link to this photo:
