TAMPA, Fla. (May 20, 2025) – Michael Kelly, USF’s vice president for athletics, has enjoyed a Forrest Gump-like career in sports, working with premier events such as the Super Bowl, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four and the College Football Playoff.

Last Thursday at USF’s Muma College of Business, Kelly was reunited with three of the men who helped to shape his lifetime of big-ticket sports experiences.

Kelly moderated an AMP (Academic Meets Practice) panel discussion — “Mega-Events and the Making of a Sports Destination: Leadership, Community, and the Business of Hosting” — that included who he described as “three of the true pioneers and icons of the sports event business.”

 

• Jim Steeg, the former NFL senior vice president of special events who oversaw the Super Bowl for 26 years. Kelly worked as president of the Super Bowl host committees in Tampa, Jacksonville and Miami.
• Bill Hancock, the first full-time director of the Final Four who became executive director of college football’s Bowl Championship Series, then the College Football Playoff. Kelly was executive director of the Tampa Bay organizing committee for the 1999 Final Four at Tropicana Field. Then he became Hancock’s first CFP hire, working as chief operating officer from 2012-18 before joining USF.
• Rob Higgins, executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission. Kelly was a USF associate athletic director in 2001-02, when Higgins worked in event management. Kelly continues to work closely with Higgins because USF is the host institution for many events the TBSC brings to Tampa Bay, such as the NCAA Women’s Final Four, the NCAA Volleyball Championships and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

“These three gentlemen can give us a true picture of how major sports events began in Tampa Bay, where they are today and how USF has contributed to that growth … and the whole thing is quite a fascinating story,” Kelly said.

Tampa Bay: Ideal For Big Events

Hancock said sports-event organizers generally need excellence in four key areas — airport, stadium/arena, hotels and a convention center — and the Tampa Bay area checks all those boxes.

“There’s a fifth one that’s so important and it’s so hard to gauge,” Hancock said. “It’s the heart and soul of the city willing to put on the event. And the heart and soul is sitting right here (Higgins). But even more, you are a big old small town, where people show up, roll up their sleeves and get things done.”

“It’s about the people, what they bring to it, and how they care,” Steeg said. “You have a lot of people here who have lived here their whole lives and they’re ingrained in the community. It’s important to them to see the community grow. It’s a can-do attitude. Tampa is a place where, if you need to get something done, you can walk in and talk to the mayor or the police chief. And it will get done.”

Booming Business: Sports Tourism

Higgins said when he joined the TBSC some 21 years ago, there were approximately 100 sports commissions. Now there are 650 … and counting.

“Communities everywhere have seen the return on investment when it comes to the impact of sporting events,” Higgins said. “You think about economic impact, hotel visitation, director visitor spending. But it’s also the social impact, how these events galvanize the community as well as the stage that these events put your community on.

“When we evaluate events, we always look at those three buckets — economic impact, social impact, plus marketing and visibility that the community will receive.”

From November through early May, Higgins pointed to the diversity of sporting events hosted in Tampa Bay.

In November, the Red Bull Flugtag attracted nearly 100,000 people (and millions of YouTube views) to the Tampa Convention Center. In February, it was the largest crowd (42,017) to witness a soccer match at Raymond James Stadium, when Lionel Messi appeared. In March, back at Ray-Jay, it was the Savannah Bananas attracting 65,000 fans. In April at Amalie Arena, it was the NCAA Women’s Final Four and more sellout crowds. Most recently, more than 20,000 cheerleaders descended upon downtown Tampa for the Varsity Spirit competition.

“It has been a great run,” Higgins said. “And it all really started with these guys (Steeg and Hancock) believing in our community and giving us this first chance that allowed us to build up the credibility to all these different events.”

Higgins said the TBSC has been affiliated with 99 different events over the last 12 months that created more than 232,000 hotel room nights.

“It means our 60,000 tourism and hospitality employees remain employed and we continue to refuel the engine,” Higgins said. “And it also probably means that we don’t have to pay a state income tax because we’re able to lean on tourism the way that we do to generate revenue for our community.”

Tampa’s First Super Bowl

Super Bowl XVII — Raiders 38, Redskins 9 — was held at Tampa Stadium in 1984. The event has returned four times (including the last three at Ray-Jay).

But the first one?

It actually dates back to 1974, when the NFL awarded a franchise (which became the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) to Tampa.

“Leonard Levy (Tampa’s primary civic activist) had the vision,” Steeg said. “The franchise had literally just been awarded in New York and Leonard said, ‘OK, when do we get a Super Bowl?’ That’s when Don Weiss, executive director of the NFL, told Leonard, ‘As soon as you get a hotel room.’

“So in 1981, they broke ground on the Downtown Hyatt, which was really the city’s first big hotel. That meant a Super Bowl was feasible. But there weren’t many hotels. People stayed on Clearwater Beach, St. Pete Beach, even over in Orlando.

“As I walk around downtown (Tampa), I keep looking around and saying, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe the things that exist now.’ A lot has changed. The Bucs helped to put Tampa on the map. When the Super Bowl came, the Corporate Hospitality Village and the NFL Experience really started here. Nowadays, you don’t see any event of consequence without those elements. We started doing concerts in Tampa and we had Frank Sinatra (at the USF Sun Dome).

“Tampa’s Host Committee entertained all of the CEOs and put out the red carpet, trying to get their business. Within the next 30 months of Tampa’s first Super Bowl, more than 6,500 hotel rooms were added to Tampa. So it really helped to develop the place.”

Final Four At The Trop

Tropicana Field, the (under-repair) home of the Tampa Bay Rays, hosted the 1999 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four.

It really happened.

“And it was great,” Hancock said. “We had a great event over there. The weather was fantastic and everyone had a good time.”

It became a learning experience for the NCAA.

The 1998 South Regional was also held at the Trop, which was being frantically renovated to accommodate the first-year Rays expansion team, and heavy rains caused flooding in some of the building’s ancillary areas, including the media interview room.

“We had to adjust … but no one got electrocuted,” Hancock said with a laugh.

Nerves were frayed, but the 1999 USF-hosted event went off without a hitch, although it had a non-traditional approach with coaches and media staying in Tampa, then  being transported to St. Petersburg.

Higgins, then at USF, was the practice-court coordinator, making sure the teams didn’t get on the courts even one second too early (at Hancock’s behest) and he remembers the 1999 Final Four as “the event that really got me hooked on this industry.”

It was a big event — in a big venue.

“The big growth of the Final Four was taking it away from a conventional arena and moving it into a stadium (first in 1982 with the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans),” Hancock said. “It’s pretty easy to do in a football stadium, but moving a basketball court and seating for the fans into a baseball stadium was a phenomenal undertaking. But we built seating around the court and it was all fine.

“I also have great memories of all the events we had in the Tampa Bay area around that Final Four. Back when I started in the business, you just unlocked the stadium, people went in and watched the game, then they went home. We were so silly. Now you have fan festivals and concerts. Tampa Bay was right in the middle of all those changes, which are so standard now.”

Birth Of The CFP

Hancock jumped from the Final Four to the BCS, which matched No. 1 vs. No. 2 in college football, but it always seemed to create controversy. Then came a major milestone: College football officials voted to stage an annual four-team championship playoff.

“I was the only employee when it started,” Hancock said. “And my bosses said, ‘Well, you need to get a staff. You need an office. You need a selection committee.’ So the first person we hired to join the staff was a guy named Michael Kelly, who was the best in the business and who I wanted from day one.

“Michael joined me in putting all that together. We hired marketing people to help us select the name of the event. There was all kinds of speculation what the name might be. Maybe the College Super Bowl? Well, they sent me to a news conference in Pasadena so I could announce the name of the event. All these writers and TV people were there. I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the name of the new event is going to be … the College Football Playoff.’ And the reporter from San Antonio tweeted immediately, ‘If Bill Hancock had a dog, its name would be … ‘Dog.”’

Tampa was awarded the third CFP Championship Game, but that was partially due to a relentless pursuit of the first game (which went to heavily favored Dallas). Higgins said the request for proposal was 250 pages. Tampa’s response was 8,000 pages … and it was hand-delivered to CFP headquarters. Higgins said he learned about that level of commitment — and selling your community through relationships — from Levy.

“But when the bids were opened for the second and third game — and everybody was ready to throw their hat in the ring — we already had a head start on paper,” Higgins said. “We made it closer than expected (for the first-game bid, won by Dallas).

“Leonard always taught us that, no matter what, you tell your story. You tell your story, then you tell your story and when you get tired of telling your story, you tell it again. We were fortunate to be blessed with the opportunity (of hosting the 2017 CFP title game). It was the debut of our Riverwalk. It created a fan experience that was linear throughout the parks. It showcased our waterway and how much our community had transformed.”

When Things Go Wrong

Tampa’s 1991 Super Bowl XXV, staged as the Gulf War broke out, had complications and security concerns. But everything played out perfectly, security was tight, and Whitney Houston delivered a National Anthem for the ages.

What almost no one say: One day before the game, the NFL had concerns. At Tampa Stadium, the NFL logo in the middle of the field was coming up in everyone’s cleats because none of the grass seed had properly grown following the Hall of Fame Bowl held on Jan. 1.

George Toma, the NFL’s groundskeeping consultant, told Steeg he had to replace the middle-field turf … about 26 hours before kickoff.

Steeg couldn’t believe it. “How?” he said.

“Don’t worry,” Toma said. “I’ll get it done.”

Sure enough, on game day, the field had been redone. It was perfect. There were no problems.

Steeg had to ask: Where did you get that turf?

Toma just smiled. “Well, if you were the athletic director at the University of Tampa, you probably woke up on Monday morning and wondered where your soccer field went.”

That story reminded Higgins of 2003, when Tampa hosted the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament early rounds in downtown Tampa. The first game — Auburn vs. Saint Joseph’s — was about to go live throughout the nation.

Fifteen minutes out, the sideline reporters started flicking away water. It was raining inside. The roof had sprung a leak and the court was taking on some water.

The facility manager told a panicked Higgins that a lightning rod had likely been struck, causing the leak.

“This has to be fixed right now,” Higgins said with the CBS cameras already poised. “There isn’t an option.”

When CBS went live, the court was dry. The leak had stopped. Everything was fine. He saw the facility manager, gave him a hug and asked what happened.

“Tri-polymer catch basin … look up,” he said.

Higgins looked to the roof. And there, hanging by a rope from the catwalk, was a plastic bucket, catching the dripping leak.

“You can either be part of the problem or part of the solution … and he chose to be part of the solution,” Higgins said. “Sometimes in this business, you’ve got to be creative.”

Epilogue

Afterward, Kelly could only marvel at the experience and pedigree of the panel that visited USF.

“The stories could go on forever,” Kelly said. “At USF, we’re honored to be part of it. It’s a long, distinguished history of hosting big sporting events to benefit this community. That’s part of our legacy and part of our future.”