Andy BackstromContributing writerThu, November 27, 2025 at 1:39 AM UTC·3 min readUniversity of Louisiana-Monroe is finalizing the hire of Oral Roberts deputy athletic director SJ Tuohy as its next AD, sources told Yahoo Sports' Ross Dellenger on Wednesday night.
Tuohy, who operated the UCF NIL collective under Gus Malzahn, is the son of the family who inspired the hit 2009 movie "The Blind Side," which took the best-selling book to the silver screen and portrayed the story of a once-homeless, 16-year-old Michael Oher finding family stability and football stardom in the suburbs of Memphis.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementSean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, though, are no longer Oher's conservators, after the Ole Miss-turned-NFL offensive lineman alleged in 2023 that the family misled him into signing a conservatorship as a rising high school senior.
The conservatorship, which the Tuohys opted for instead of adoption in 2004, allowed them to control Oher's finances. In a Tennessee court petition two and a half years ago, Oher alleged that the Tuohys made millions from the movie while he didn't receive anything from a Hollywood portrayal he's publicly criticized. But Sean and Leigh Anne responded to those serious allegations at the time in a statement by saying they were the latest "shakedown" by Oher to get money from the family, and that the much less significant sum they did make from the film was distributed evenly among the four Tuohy family members and Oher.
The very public back-and-forth put into question the sanctity of the story that was told in print and on screen.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementSJ Tuohy notably spoke out about Oher's allegations, telling Barstool Sports in 2023, "I get it why he's mad, I completely understand," regarding Oher's pursuit of compensation for the high-grossing film.
Tuohy noted back then that he had earned about $60,000-$70,000 in royalties over the past four or five years, nowhere close to the amount he said friends assumed after Oher's petition that summer.
Most recently, Tuohy has worked in development at Oral Roberts. Before that, he was the executive director of The Kingdom NIL, UCF's official NIL collective. He also held roles as an associate athletic director and football chief of staff for the Knights.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementPrior to his stay at UCF, Tuohy made stops at Liberty and Arkansas.
Tuohy was at Liberty during the Flames' breakout 2020 football season that saw them finish the year No. 17 in the AP poll. At the time, he served as an assistant athletics director and as a director of football operations.
Earlier in his career, Tuohy, who played four seasons of college basketball at Loyola University Maryland and one season of college football at SMU, was an associate director of football operations at Arkansas and a special teams assistant at SMU.
Tuohy's winding athletics path is now taking him to ULM, where he'll hold his first AD position.
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