FAYETTEVILLE — With half-packed cardboard boxes scattered about his office, Jon Fagg began preparing for an afternoon meeting.
With less than four full days remaining in a job he loves dearly, Fagg was still giving the University of Arkansas his best effort Tuesday. On Friday he will leave his third-floor office on the north end of Reynolds Razorback Stadium for the final time after 14 years as a senior-level administrator in the athletics department.
It is a bittersweet time for Fagg, 54, who was hired in June as the athletics director at the University of Texas-Arlington, a 41,000-enrollment, non-football-playing school that earlier this month became a member of the Western Athletic Conference. Fagg begins work in the Dallas suburb on Aug. 1.
Leaving Fayetteville will be difficult. In his resignation letter, Fagg referred to the university, state and Northwest Arkansas as his home and wrote he hated to leave "this amazing place."
He shared similar sentiments during a lengthy conversation Tuesday.
“I really do feel so fortunate to have worked here,” Fagg said. “It's one of the reasons why I've stayed so long, because I really love this place. The state of Arkansas, the University of Arkansas — there are a few schools out there in the country that really do have a special relationship with the community and the state, and this is one of them.”
UTA will be Fagg’s first athletics department to lead, but those who have worked with him say he is well qualified.
“In my opinion, he should have gotten an opportunity to be an athletics director long before this,” said Jeff Long, the former Arkansas athletics director who hired Fagg in 2008 and worked with him until 2017.
Fagg has more than a quarter-century experience in college sports administration since he left the football coaching profession in the 1990s. He was a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Arizona, and spent time on coaching staffs in North Carolina at Mars Hill College and Davidson.
As the No. 1 compliance officer at Arkansas, Fagg oversaw and helped implement many changes during a revolutionary time in college sports that included soaring revenues and spending for athletics departments, and expanded rights for athletes.
The Razorbacks have nearly tripled their annual revenue since 2008 with no slowdown in sight. Issues like cost of attendance, NIL and unrestricted transfers were far from reality when Fagg was hired.
“Sometimes I don't think it feels that much different,” Fagg said. “We're still trying to win games, trying to graduate kids, trying to make good people.
"But, yeah, it's just bigger. It definitely feels bigger, especially right now.”
Fagg previously worked seven years at North Carolina State. He said he was introduced to Long through a mutual friend, Greg Sankey, who is now the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
Long and Fagg did not know one another personally, but Long knew of Fagg, who spent four years at Fresno State before he was hired at NC State.
“He went toe to toe with (Hall of Fame basketball coach) Jerry Tarkanian at Fresno,” Long said, “and I felt I needed someone strong in compliance at Arkansas and in the SEC, and someone that had been there and dealt with very difficult, challenging situations. And that was Jon, and Jon was able to do those things for me and for Arkansas.”
Fagg inherited a pair of high-profile compliance issues at Arkansas — the NCAA appeals process after the men’s track and field program was stripped of two national championships, and the basketball team’s low score in the Academic Progress Rate that ultimately resulted in the loss of a scholarship for the 2011-12 season. The basketball team avoided a postseason ban thanks in part to the work of Fagg and his colleagues.
Fagg's role evolved beyond a compliance director and more into a right-hand man charged with big-picture thinking. He was a trusted confidant for his two bosses, Long and current Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek.
“I think the biggest challenge any AD has is finding people who will tell them what they need to know, not what they want to hear,” Long said, “and Jon was very confident and comfortable in his own skin and what he knew."
Fagg also gained respect as a sport administrator for football, men’s basketball and other sports.
“He works well with coaches,” Long said. “He doesn't let coaches roll over him. He works with them, and I think they respect that.”
In addition to his other day-to-day duties, Yurachek placed Fagg in the role of football sport administrator after Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman was hired in December 2019.
"Quite honestly, that's probably been Jon's most important role over the past two years," Yurachek said, "is really being a part of our football program and helping Sam become the head coach that he and I thought he could be."
Yurachek has leaned heavily on Fagg’s expertise since he was hired to lead the department in December 2017.
“He was an invaluable resource to me as a director of athletics,” Yurachek said.
“I wanted to come in and kind of meet with the right people, ask the right questions, listen intently and then develop and formulate my plan of how we're going to move forward as a department. And Jon was very much a part of that from the start.”
Yurachek said Fagg helped lay the groundwork for the Razorbacks’ name, image and likeness (NIL) program known as The Flagship, which resulted in 662 endorsement deals for 224 athletes that were worth a combined $2 million in its first year.
Long said Fagg was instrumental in the UA’s implementation of the merger of the men’s and women’s athletics departments in 2008. He was also involved in virtually every high-profile hire or firing in the last 14 years.
In 2019, Fagg traversed the U.S. on private jets with Yurachek during searches that resulted in the hirings of Pittman and men's basketball coach Eric Musselman.
“I knew I could trust Jon and wanted to keep the circle fairly tight,” Yurachek said. “Jon is a thinker by personality and he asked the right questions about each of the candidates as we were reading those through. We spent a lot of time on an airplane traveling around during both of those searches to meet coaches and got to know each other pretty well, and I enjoyed spending time with him.
“He’s been in this business almost as long or maybe longer than I have. He’s been in the ACC and he's been in the SEC for a while. He was a former coach himself. And so, you know, having a former coach when you're trying to find a football or basketball coach, I mean, it was a tremendous resource to me.”
Fagg also helped bring successful coaches Colby Hale (soccer) and Courtney Deifel (softball) to campus when Long was AD, part of a series of decisions that has helped Arkansas build a strong winning culture across its 19 sports.
“The camaraderie that has been created between our head coaches, I think that's a major piece of the culture of winning that has really evolved and exploded here in the last two years,” Fagg said.
Another achievement Fagg is proud of has been the evolution of athletes’ academic success. He arrived at a time when the NCAA’s academic report cards, Academic Progress Rate and the Graduation Success Rate, were relatively new and some of the university’s teams struggled to reach benchmark scores. Coaches and athletes had to be educated of the importance of scores, which had the potential to carry penalties for poor performance.
Arkansas has vastly improved its standing in the annual APR and GSR scores, not only in equivalency sports that include many athletes on academic scholarship, but also in the higher-profile sports that provide full athletic scholarships.
“We just helped our kids understand the importance of academics,” said Fagg, who added, “I want to emphasize it's we, it's not me. It’s our coaches and our kids executing things that we ask them and hope that they'll execute.”
Fagg said Arkansas has also created a “culture of cooperation” with NCAA and SEC compliance.
“Lots of schools have a little bit of an adversarial relationship with their compliance office,” he said, “and I don't think we do. It certainly doesn't seem like we do. I'm really, really proud of that.”
Fagg indicated that the most challenging times at Arkansas came in the form of personnel changes. He helped lead the university investigation that resulted in the firing of football coach Bobby Petrino for misconduct in 2012, and was in attendance for a defining job performance review of men’s basketball coach Mike Anderson the day before Anderson was let go in 2019.
“Dealing with Coach Anderson at the time was really tough because Coach Anderson is just one of the best people I've ever been around,” Fagg said.
Of the Petrino investigation, Fagg said, “That was a hard time. You know, I mean, it was necessary at the time, but really hard.”
Fagg has had opportunities to leave Arkansas, but often put personal ambition aside as he raised his three children. His oldest son, Jon Madison, graduated from Fayetteville High School and the UA. His twins, son Reed and daughter Ellie, graduated FHS two years ago and are rising UA juniors.
“I think we will be frequent visitors in the future,” Fagg said of his children remaining in Fayetteville.
“Kids being that age certainly made it easier to stay,” Fagg said, “but the SEC and University of Arkansas and the fact that the SEC is the best conference in the country, most competitive conference in the country — it's really, really fun to be a part of.
“Looking back on it, I'm glad I've made the decisions that I've made. UTA is an incredible opportunity. I can't wait to get started. It's going to be a different experience because it's my wife and me moving instead of, you know, moving a family.”
At UTA, Fagg will oversee the department’s first year in the WAC, a conference he knows well from his four years at Fresno State. Fagg also grew up around the WAC when his father, Dave, was an assistant football coach at Hawaii.
“I’m excited to be back in the WAC,” Fagg said. “It’s a conference that holds something special to me, even though the dynamics and the makeup of the conference are different than when I've been in it before.
“It’s actually probably way more personal than people would realize.”
It will be a much different work experience in Arlington. Whereas most Arkansans seem to live and breathe everything Razorback, UTA is located in a crowded sports market that includes professional franchises, several colleges and some of the most passionate high school fan bases on the planet.
In his introductory address, Fagg urged UTA fans and alumni to be active. He noted the university’s largest sporting venue seats 7,000 spectators — less than 2% of the population of the city of Arlington.
“There’s a space for all of it,” Fagg said of sports in the area. “The people in Arlington, the leadership of the city, the Rangers, the Cowboys all have already been incredibly supportive.”
While his focus will turn soon toward leading the Mavericks, Fagg said he will always have an eye on the Razorbacks.
“Someone literally asked me, ‘Hey, does this mean you're not an Arkansas fan anymore?’” Fagg said. “I was like, ‘No!’
"First of all, I’m an Arkansas dad. This is where my kids have gone to school. There's room in my life to be an Arkansas fan and a UTA fan and leader.”