The University of Oklahoma paid former NFL executive Jake Rosenberg $250,000 to facilitate the hiring of the school’s new athletic director, according to public records obtained by Sportico.
The quarter-million-dollar fee sits at the high end of the market, as power conference athletic director searches typically peak around $150,000. In choosing Rosenberg, OU not only spent heavily but entrusted the process of replacing long-time AD Joe Castiglione to a relative newcomer in the field. After a six-month process, the Sooners taped Roger Denny, the former No. 2 athletics administrator at Illinois, to fill the big seat in Norman, Okla.
Rosenberg hopes Denny’s hire signals not just a win for the SEC school, but also vindication in what he describes as his norm-breaking approach to a sector long dominated by firms like TurnkeyZRG, Korn Ferry and Parker Executive Search.
When asked about the cost of the search, Rosenberg declined to comment directly. “It is what it is,” he said. He did, however, have much to say about the value he believe he brings to the space.
“I think there is a lot of search out there, I just don’t think it is particularly value added,” he said in a phone interview with Sportico. “There are a lot of preexisting relationships between search firms and a lot of preexisting knowledge of candidates and personal relationships, and I think there are situations probably where rearranging one athletic director to another school happens over finding [candidates with] the best set of skills.”
Rosenberg, formerly the Philadelphia Eagles’ vice president of football administration, launched his consulting firm, The Athlete Group (TAG), in 2024. Oklahoma was TAG’s first publicly known client, initially retained to help fill the school’s general manager position. That job went to Jim Nagy, the former NFL scout and executive director of the Senior Bowl.
Following Castiglione’s retirement announcement last summer, OU signed a new agreement with TAG to lead the search for his replacement. Rosenberg said he spent six weeks crafting the job describing and defining what modern athletic directors should be doing.
Given his background and philosophy, Rosenberg said he assumed the winning candidate would come from outside a college athletic department.
“We didn’t think someone within athletics would have (the necessary) expertise,” Rosenberg said. “I guess we were right in that Roger spent most of his career not in an athletic department, so the fact that he has the skill set was gained largely outside of college athletics.”
Prior to his time at Illinois, Denny was a partner at Spencer Fane LLP, where he represented college athletic departments out of the law firm’s St. Louis office.
Rosenberg has positioned his firm as disruptor in a sector bound by convention.
Notably, the portion of the search agreement describing TAG’s “process” was redacted in the copy provided to Sportico, on account of it containing trade secrets. The contract also included an addendum providing that any records created by the firm in the course of the search would remain TAG’s property. It further stipulated that those records would only be disclosable to the university through a third-party portal that TAG could “disable at any time.”
Such a provision appears designed to limit or circumvent the disclosure of information in response to public records requests.
In addition to its work for OU, TAG led the search for Florida’s mew general manager, Dave Caldwell, and has provided advisory services to the athletic departments at Florida State and Stanford. Rosenberg says his search model is “scalable and transferable” to hiring coaches.
Although TAG has yet to be retained for other AD searches, Rosenberg expects it is only a matter of time.
“I strongly believe that this model and general profile for the way Roger was hired will become ubiquitous,” Rosenberg said.
Outside of TAG, Rosenberg and his business parter, Jason Adams, also run an app-based advisory and digital platform called The Doctor Group, which purports to “protect and maximize professional IP for the modern physician.” Rosenberg says his role in that venture is largely passive.