What J Batt's Move From Michigan State to Kentucky Means for Both Athletic Departments

Turmoil continues for the Spartans, while the Wildcats are building continuity.

J Batt speaks to audience at Michigan State, which he’ll leave after just one year. | Nick King/Lansing State Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

When Michigan State introduced J Batt as its athletic director in 2025, the former Georgia Tech department head expressed a bold vision for the Spartans.

“Working together, in alignment with university leadership, the full athletics department and an enthusiastic fan base, we can take the positive momentum already happening at MSU and reach new levels of success as we move into the next era of intercollegiate athletics,” Batt said in a Michigan State release on June 2, 2025.

How quickly the winds change in college sports. When Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart announced his retirement in March, a jewel of an assignment in the industry opened up. On Monday, Batt took it, becoming the Wildcats’ first new athletic director in over two decades.

Batt’s early departure for Kentucky marks him as both an opportunist and a rising star

The 44-year-old Champaign, Ill., native and former North Carolina soccer player turned to administration not long after graduating, and he quickly began to rise through the college athletics ranks. After a stint as East Carolina’s associate athletic director, Alabama hired Batt as deputy athletic director, and he worked for the Crimson Tide through the later days of football coach Nick Saban’s stint and the early days of men’s basketball coach Nate Oats’s tenure.

Lessons from Alabama followed Batt to the Yellow Jackets, where he made the fortuitous hire of interim football coach Brent Key as Georgia Tech’s full-time boss (he’s taken the program to three straight bowl games). From the Yellow Jackets, he moved to the Spartans for a year before picking up his new gig with the Wildcats.

Michigan State will now hire a fourth athletic director in a decade

If the Spartans were hoping for stability atop their athletic department after the horrors of the Larry Nassar scandal, that stability has yet to materialize. Michigan State’s athletic director will be its fourth in eight years since Mark Hollis’s 2018 resignation, joining Bill Beekman, Alan Haller and Batts.

Batt’s replacement, if they stick around long enough, will have two enormous tasks ahead of them. First, they will have to police new football coach Pat Fitzgerald, who brings considerable baggage from a hazing scandal at Northwestern although a legal settlement established he did not encourage or condone it. Second, they may have to replace men’s basketball coach and de facto university ambassador Tom Izzo, who at 71 isn’t getting any younger.

Barnhart has left Batt enormous shoes to fill at Kentucky

The ex-Wildcats department boss was the dean of SEC athletic directors, and earned that role with an impressive track record of revenue-sports hires. In football, he lured Rich Brooks out of retirement and Mark Stoops from Florida State’s staff—they both rank in the top 10 in program history in wins. In men’s basketball, he brought in John Calipari and won a national title in 2012. In women’s basketball, he hired the program’s winningest coach in Matthew Mitchell and the platonic ideal of a modern winner in Kenny Brooks.

This is a make-or-break year for Kentucky’s flagship sports program, men’s basketball

Barnhart made three men’s basketball coaching hires in all, and the third may be the most controversial (the first, Billy Gillispie, was an undisputed misfire). The Wildcats’ hire of coach Mark Pope before the 2025 season was celebrated in some quarters as the return of a native son, but also had the stench of Kentucky settling after rumors connected it to Baylor’s Scott Drew and UConn’s Dan Hurley.

After two years, results have been mixed by the Wildcats’ otherwordly standards. After capturing a No. 3 NCAA seed and reaching the Sweet 16 in Pope’s first year, Kentucky lost 14 games and bowed out in the second round (after nearly losing to Santa Clara in the first round) in year two. He then struggled out of the gate to land transfers, a critique rendered largely moot when forward Milan Momcilovic joined the Wildcats from Iowa State at the last moment. The 2027 season will go a long way toward determining how soon Batt has to make another hire.

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