Patrick Elliot was named as Binghamton University’s next athletic director last Thursday. After more than two years of what could be seen as a Jim Norris’ lame duck — albeit productive — reign, hiring a new AD will give our athletic department stability and an opportunity to move forward.

Hiring the new AD was no walk in the park. Elliot and the two other finalists for the position, Tom Brennan and Eric Roedl, were picked from a field of approximately 40 applicants. Elliot and Brennan already held AD positions at other Division I schools — Saint Peter’s College and La Salle University, respectively — while Roedl was deputy AD at Temple University, which boasts a Division I program much larger than BU’s.

All three candidates have already had successful careers, and it seems that any of them would have been a good fit for BU, but the selection committee thought Elliot stood out from the pack.

Academic success was the cornerstone of Elliot’s tenure at Saint Peter’s. He established the Athletic Director’s Academic Honor Roll and in his first year saw a 91 percent graduation rate of athletes exhausting eligibility. At a University that is still looking to rid itself of the stench of player misconduct, coaching violations and NCAA audits, Elliot seems apt for the job.

Elliot, whose wife is from the area according to Norris, lauded the Binghamton region at a press conference Thursday.

“This region has so many people who are very interested in Binghamton athletics, so what I’d like to do is to bring it out to them, and to make sure that BU athletics, throughout the Southern Tier region, is something everyone can identify with,” Elliot said.

Upstate New York is a hotbed for college basketball, but is undoubtedly Syracuse country. Even here in the Triple Cities, locals bleed orange. If Elliot can further bridge the gap between the University and the community with a bigger Bearcat fan base, then all the power to him. It will only help to establish Binghamton as more of a “college town,” giving students and residents something to rally around together.

He just needs to run an honest, productive program, where academic standards are not abandoned in the pursuit of sport victories. If his stated goals are any indication, he seems focused on getting the job done.

“We’re going to stand for integrity, and we’re going to stand for going forward and showing people that we’re going to run the program, on and off the court, with integrity,” Elliot said Thursday.

His mission statement is hopefully a glimpse of things to come, but he needs to avoid falling into the same traps of administrations past.

A successful Division I program is sexy. The few of us left here from 2009 had a romanticized view of our men’s basketball team and its run to the NCAA Tournament, blind to the wrongdoings happening right under our noses.

But only a few months later, we learned that things are not always as they appear. The way in which our school sacrificed academic integrity for athletic success was shameful, misguided and downright embarrassing.

Joel Thirer oversaw this downfall, Jim Norris brought us back to status quo and now it is up to Patrick Elliot to steer our athletic program to a bigger and brighter future.