Back in Boulder: athletic director Rick George once excelled as CU's recruiting coordinator; now he's recruiting donors.

• Author: Ringo, Kyle
• Position: ATHLETICS

NOT MANY SUCCESSFUL CEO types would jump at the chance to lead an organization failing as badly as the University of Colorado's athletic department was just one year ago. Fixing a department drowning in debt, hemorrhaging customers, with apathy among donors and competitors relishing every chance to rub the Buffaloes' noses in it, hardly seemed like a dream job.

Yet Rick George left behind a lucrative vice president position with the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball to dive into a restoration project in Boulder few thought could be accomplished. He is the sixth full-time athletic director in the school's history. While the final results are still in the distance, George is off to a strong start with record-breaking fundraising totals enabling the start of a major overhaul of portions of Folsom Field and the surrounding area that will require an estimated $181 million.

CU athletics had never raised more than $15 million in private donations in a single year before George arrived. The program collected nearly $50 million his first year as athletic director.

"I know we need to think big and we need to go big," he said in his first days on the job. "We just need to have a very good game plan."

George inherited a $5.6 million budget shortfall caused by poor football ticket sales adding to more than $20 million the department already owed the school because of the costs of switching conferences in 2011 and multiple football coaching changes. He managed to trim the shortfall to $4 million by cutting expenses during his first year, and he submitted a balanced budget for the 2014-15 school year, the first balanced budget submitted by the department since CU made the move to the Pac-12 Conference.

George also brought together more than 30 people, some in his department and some from the outside, to create a strategic plan for CU athletics. It set goals for each program and the department as a whole for the next three years, including its long-struggling football team playing in the conference championship game by 2016.

"I feel like we've done a lot, but there is just so much to do moving forward for us. We've got to stabilize our financial situation," George said. "We've got to find ways to generate revenue, and we've still got a lot of work to do on that."

George, 54, always has been driven and a guy people are drawn to. He earned a scholarship to play football as a defensive back at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. When he graduated...