Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne has been around college athletics his whole life. He didn’t have much of a choice: his father, Bill Byrne, has worked in athletics administration since the 38-year-old was a child.

“I was around all the time. I ball-boyed, I was around coaches, I’d go out to practice all the time,” Byrne said.

From that exposure came a love for sports and a career in athletics. He started out unloading trucks and sweeping floors as a Fiesta Bowl intern at 21 years old, then worked his way up through Oregon, Oregon State, Kentucky and Mississippi State before a two-year tenure as athletic director at MSU. But given his west coast upbringing and Pac-10 connections, the opening at Arizona was too good to pass up.

“To me, Arizona was always up on this pedestal,” Byrne said. “I knew Arizona had won multiple national championships in a lot of different sports, and it has, historically, been viewed as one of the top programs in the country, but we’ve slipped a little bit. So I saw a great opportunity to hopefully come in and make a difference and help us improve.”

With a 55 million-dollar budget, Byrne wants to continue updating facilities, improve fan attendance and behavior, and compete for championships. But he says his main priority is raising student-athlete graduation rates. According to the NCAA's annual Graduation Success Rate report, Arizona has the lowest graduation rate in all of the six power conferences, with over a third of its athletes never getting a college diploma.

Byrne has already set guidelines to reverse the trend.

“I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I know that if you go to class, you do better, and so we have told our student-athletes that if they don’t go to class, they’re not going to play,” Byrne said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re the star quarterback or the last person coming off the bench for the volleyball team.  They will go to class or they won’t have the opportunity to play.”

It would be easy for someone in Byrne’s position to have an ego. He is, after all, in charge of the biggest game in town. But between his faith and his relationship with his wife, Regina, and sons Nick, 15, and Davis, 13, Byrne stays grounded.

“There’s a lot of ways to succeed as an athletic director, and there’s a lot of ways to fail, too. As you may be surprised, there’s an occasional ego in college athletics. At times, it’s easy for us to get caught up in what we’re doing and think ‘Boy, we’re all that.’ We’re all replaceable. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow—knock on wood—they’ll have somebody else in here who is good at doing this job. But here I am, and honored to be a part of it.”

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