John Cohen

Football claimed its first win over a ranked opponent in a bowl game since 1940.

Men's basketball turned in a runner-up finish at the 2021 NIT, earning a bid in postseason play for the third straight year.

John Cohen (born September 21, 1966) is the 16th athletic director for the Auburn University Tigers.

Cohen played college baseball at Mississippi State (1988–1990) after spending a single season at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama (1986).

In 1989, he played collegiate summer baseball with the Hyannis Mets of the Cape Cod Baseball League and was named a league all-star.

He also played on the 1990 College World Series team his senior year at Mississippi State.

He then spent two years in the Minnesota Twins farm system (1990–1991).

Cohen served as an assistant coach at the University of Missouri from 1992 to 1997 before becoming head coach at Northwestern State University from 1998 to 2001, where he won two conference championships.

He moved on to the University of Florida for two seasons (2002–2003) as an assistant before accepting the head coaching job at the University of Kentucky.

On June 6, 2008, Cohen was announced as the head coach of his alma mater, Mississippi State.

John Cohen became the new Auburn Athletic Director in November 2022, replacing Allen Greene.

In Cohen's previous stop, he was AD at his alma mater, Mississippi State University.

He is former head baseball coach of Mississippi State University, where he also served as the athletic director from 2016 to 2022.

John Cohen guided the Bulldog program to record-breaking success since being announced as the school's 17th director of athletics on November 4, 2016.

Cohen leads a department that encompasses 16 sports and more than 350 student-athletes.

The former MSU head baseball coach and two-time Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year has overseen arguably the greatest era in Bulldog athletics history, highlighted by a 2021 College World Series Championship for the school's first team national title in any sport.

Softball finished the regular season winning seven straight SEC games and reached the NCAA tournament for the 16th time.

Track and field was well-represented in Tokyo, Japan, at the Olympic Games with six Bulldogs competing for their respective countries.

Eight members of the track and field earned All-America honors at either the indoor or outdoor NCAA Track and Field Championships, and the men's team finished ranked inside the top 15 nationally.

Meanwhile, Bulldog student-athletes enjoyed success in the classroom again during the spring of 2021, posting the highest department GPA for a semester ever at 3.2.

Four programs (baseball, men's basketball, football and women's golf) recorded their highest-ever spring GPA, while football's GPA marked its highest ever at the time.

MSU student-athletes continue to earn opportunities to compete at the next level.

That occurred just a year after the Bulldogs produced a then-school-record 12 postseason squads during the 2017-18 athletic campaign.

In the classroom, MSU student-athletes continue to set new standards achieving a department GPA of 3.0 or higher for nine consecutive semesters while continuing to exceed the national APR multiyear rate in all sports.

Most recently, Bulldog student-athletes turned in a 3.1 GPA in the fall of 2021 with 11 sports recording at least a 3.0 GPA.

Under Cohen's watch, 44 teams have advanced to NCAA postseason play, including a school-record 13 during the 2018-19 athletic year.

A nationally respected leader within intercollegiate athletics, Cohen serves on the prestigious 10-member NCAA Division I Baseball Committee as part of a four-year term that began on September 1, 2019.

Sixteen individuals have played and coached in the College World Series.

Cohen is one of two among that elite group, who have played, coached and later served as director of athletics for a participating school.

He is one of three active SEC athletics director to hire an eventual national championship winning head coach in any sport.

So far during the 2021-22 athletic year, football became one of eight programs nationally and four in the SEC to make a bowl game in each of the last dozen years, joining Alabama, Georgia and Texas A&M as the only conference teams to do so.

The Bulldogs were one of four teams in the nation with three wins against opponents ranked in the final College Football Playoff Top 25 and the only team in the nation that faced six teams in the final rankings during the season.

In the classroom, head coach Mike Leach's squad turned in a record GPA for the second straight semester.

Volleyball made the program's first NCAA tournament appearance after earning an at-large bid.

The Bulldogs rewrote the record books, posting a 25–6 overall record and 16–2 mark in SEC play to finish second overall in the conference.

Head coach Julie Darty Dennis was named the 2021 SEC Coach of the Year and the 2021 AVCA South Region Coach of the Year after leading the Bulldogs to the most successful season in program history.

Dennis became the first coach in MSU volleyball history to take home Coach of the Year honors.

State's 2020-21 athletic year featured unprecedented success in the sport of baseball.

Tanner Allen earned the SEC's Player of the Year award, head coach Chris Lemonis garnered National Coach of the Year accolades, and most notably, the Bulldogs won the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, among 25,000-plus members of the Bulldog family.

In 2020, MSU was the only school in the country with multiple players selected in each of the NFL, MLB and NBA drafts.