Two candidates to be UGA’s AD: McGarity and Williams

Carla Williams (right) could well be Georgia's next AD. (AJC photo by Curtis Compton)

Georgia is again in the market for an athletics director, and it’s safe to assume Vincent J. Dooley won’t be riding to the rescue. (Michael F. Adams would rather eat a charbroiled rat than turn to Dooley.) There seem two logical candidates. Both are Georgia natives and UGA, and one of them a UGA employee. The two:

Greg McGarity: He’s from Athens. He played tennis under Dan Magill at UGA. He worked his way up the athletics department chain of command under Dooley. He left in 1992 to become an assistant AD at Florida, and he’s now Jeremy Foley’s chief aide. He’s wildly popular among Georgia fans, and his background of having worked under two of the best in the business — Dooley and Foley — would make him the odds-on favorite. Except for this:

Adams is still Georgia’s president. McGarity was viewed as a likely successor to Dooley back in 2004 but wasn’t hired. The thinking then was that he was viewed by Adams as a Dooley loyalist.

It’s possible that, six years later, the president has softened his anti-Dooley stance. It’s also possible he hasn’t. In which case, the leading candidate would be …

Carla Williams: She’s from LaGrange. She played basketball (as Carla Green) at Georgia under Andy Landers. She has a PhD from Florida State. She has worked as an assistant AD at Vanderbilt. She has worked at UGA as assistant AD since 2004 and has been regarded as a rising star in the nation’s second-most profitable athletics department.

It was Adams who, with Damon Evans in 2004, appointed the first African-American AD in SEC history. Williams would be the first female athletics director the conference has seen and would surely meet with in-house approval.

My guess: Carla Williams.