The calm and wisdom of Harold Wilkes. The goodness, decency and endearing Southern charm of Steve Sloan. The patience, work ethic, vision and appreciation of rules and laws of Rick Hart. The hiring genius and drive of David Blackburn.
Were I able to create my perfect athletic director for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, those are the traits I have admired most in those four former ADs, as well as the traits I hope the 12-person search committee announced last week will find in the next AD.
No offense to the Parker Executive Search, which will guide the process, but this is a business to the Atlanta-based firm. The company is paid a fee to both identify possible candidates and provide, if we're being completely honest here, a bit of cover in case something goes wrong down the line.
In other words, if UTC hires Candidate A - whose name was first brought to the committee and UTC chancellor Steven Angle by Parker - and it turns out Candidate A's real name is Convict C, and he or she is wanted in seven states and three countries by the FBI, CIA and INTERPOL, and he or she once holed up at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort after plastic surgery to alter his or her appearance, well, that mistake would be on Parker rather than the search committee.
But for the vast majority of the search committee, UTC athletics is more a passion than a paycheck. Committee chair and UTC physical therapy department head Debbie Ingram seemingly wears navy blue and old gold more often than Scrappy, the school's mascot.
Herbert "Book" McCray may have grown up in Louisville, Ky., but he has pretty much resided in the Scenic City ever since he helped lead the Mocs to the 1977 Division II national championship in basketball. No one wants the UTC athletic department run by a person of vision and character more than McCray.
And no one better understands the role college athletics should play in the lives of those athletes it serves than Hall of Fame women's basketball coach Jim Foster. His Mocs don't just win games, they excel in the classroom and, thanks to Foster, learn about the world and their potential for improving it.
Nor has anyone on the committee more faithfully served the school to less public acclaim than senior associate AD Laura Herron, who has been an interim during a past search and knows Title IX requirements and the school's struggles to meet them more than anyone should. If asked, she would be an excellent choice for the job she'll now help someone else land.
Private citizens Lewie Card and Don Wade are similarly passionate about the Mocs, and input from all of those fine folks and the remaining six members should serve Angle and Parker Executive Search quite well - especially if they'll attempt to reprise the best qualities of past UTC ADs as they move forward.
But there is another element to this hire that needs to be embraced. Angle, Parker and the search committee need a marketeer on the order of former Lookouts owners Joe Engel and Frank Burke. Though from vastly different eras, they understood that sports is as much about entertainment as competition.
UTC has been far too slow to accept that. It wants to be a Southeastern Conference program. It wants its fans quick to anger or frustration after defeat and slow to cheer any other school at all times.
For proof, not long after Blackburn resigned last month, I received an email from someone who once advised UTC on how to better market its sports programs. The person wrote of the school's response to possibly shooting off fireworks regardless of the result of the game: "Fireworks? After a loss? How DARE you?"
Similar stories have been told of UTC considering it an insult to compare its events to a minor league baseball game, that it views its sports teams as every bit as attractive and important to Joe and Jane Consumer as those SEC teams at Alabama, Tennessee or Georgia.
As one person familiar with the school's past marketing decisions wrote of the attitude that needs to be adopted by Mocs brass: "They might go if there is a cool event that happens to feature a football game, (and) I hope the current and future administration really understands that."
They certainly need to understand it and embrace it. This isn't to say it wouldn't be better if more fans were as passionate about the Mocs winning and losing as their Knoxville, Tuscaloosa or Athens counterparts. (To be fair, though, no conference rivals the SEC in that department.)
The reality is the overwhelming number of intensely loyal, Mocs-first-last-and-only fans are shrinking, lost far more through advancing age than disinterest. The school's enrollment may be growing, but its fan base seems stagnant at best. The next AD - or whomever Angle prefers to entrust with raising money - must be a far better fundraiser than the school has had in the past.
But the next AD also needs to increase attendance across the board, and given the recent successes of most of UTC's 15 teams in the win-loss column, the best way to do that would appear to be to take a far different stance on marketing than the school has attempted in the past.
Fireworks? After a loss? If it will dramatically increase attendance, how dare UTC not.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.