Georgia Tech Director of Athletics Mike Bobinski to be named new AD at Purdue

A pretty highly unexpected report dropped Tuesday morning from Ken Sugiura at the AJC, who reported that Georgia Tech AD Mike Bobinski will be named to the same position at Purdue as early as Tuesday morning.

UPDATE: That report has since been confirmed by RamblinWreck.com, which has indicated that Georgia Tech’s President Bud Peterson is aware of the impending move, and that Bobinski will begin his tenure at Purdue later this month.

The timing seems rather odd, as the move comes less than a month before the start of the football season, and right at the beginning of the new academic year. Still, if true, it would require Georgia Tech to find a new AD after only a little over three years under Bobinski’s reign.

Bobinski was hired away from Xavier in January 2013, where he had served as AD since 1998. He was brought in to replace Dan Radakovich, who basically picked up and left in the middle of the night in late October of 2012 to take the same job at Clemson. Over his three years, more and more fans began to express displeasure at the perceived inaction from Bobinski as leader of the athletics’ department. His biggest actions as AD have been in the past few months, between firing head basketball coach Brian Gregory and replacing him with Josh Pastner, and releasing a new Strategic Plan for the athletic department back in June. Bobinski had given no public indication that he was looking to leave Georgia Tech, and had met with media as recently as Saturday to express excitement for the coming football season.

After practice on Monday, head coach Paul Johnson expressed his displeasure with the state of the team’s facilities, his staff’s salaries, and other issues as Georgia Tech aims to keep up its competition in major college football’s “arms race” — refuting claims made by Bobinski in his Saturday press conference that there had been no complaints or requests regarding those issues.

A search to find Bobinski’s replacement will be conducted by a search committee, which will be named at a later date.