Other than whacking liberals over the head with a dose of reality one of my next favorite things is to poke at the UW Huskies. I grew up a Husky fan until I attended WSU in the late 70's. I then got my mind right and outright hated them for the next 20 years. A few years ago I started pulling for the Dogs against all other teams but WSU.

Has the UW stock gone down that far?

UW Sports
Big-time UW isn't drawing marquee AD candidates

By Bud Withers
Times college sports reporter

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Walk with us for a moment down the steps at venerated Husky Stadium on a dank November Saturday afternoon. Feel the passion of the people in the stands. See the faces, and know that this represents the oldest money in town, the deepest sporting roots in Seattle.

Now think about this: Of the three known candidates on a short list for Washington's vacancy of athletic director, none of them is currently, uh, an athletic director.

There's a disconnect in this UW search that doesn't quite add up. The school with 62,000 season-ticket holders in football — the engine that drives this and any other athletic department — appears to be at a loss to attract ADs at a big-time level.

Perhaps Mark Emmert, the incoming president, will swoop in shortly and, to steal a phrase that ought to please upper campus, make all this academic. This is how Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen describes Emmert, who was at conference meetings last week in Tucson, Ariz.:

"Man alive," Hansen said. "What a great, dynamic, sensitive human being. He's fabulous."

If all that is true, maybe Emmert can drag somebody with, say, half those qualities to UW to succeed Barbara Hedges.

Because the UW search has been kept exceedingly quiet, there are things we don't know unequivocally. That has created some UW backlash to printed reports in Salt Lake City that Utah athletic director Chris Hill turned the job down — which led to one preposterous headline indicating Hill was the seventh person to "reject" the Huskies.

However it happened, we know this: Hill's candidacy was courted a long time by UW, to the point that he was among the final few names of the search committee.

Then something interrupted Hill's march to the Graves Building, and he withdrew. In itself, that is puzzling, because when some Pac-10 jobs have come open in the past and he was encouraged to pursue them, Hill made it known that Washington and UCLA were the two that most intrigued him.

"Sometimes," committee chairman Michael Eisenberg told the Times at mid-week, "some things aren't quite the right match for people, and that's fine. We want the right person ... I can assure you that there are dozens of people salivating over this job."




Hill's pullout diminished those salivating by one. Three others were identified as search-committee survivors: Todd Turner, former Vanderbilt, North Carolina State and Connecticut AD; Jim Phillips, senior associate AD at Notre Dame; and Debi Gore-Mann, senior associate AD at Stanford.

Turner, a victim of the dramatic reorganization at Vandy last fall, is described as solid and competent. He is a lifelong Southerner who some around UConn think was out of place among Yankees in his three-year tenure there in the late '80s. He has had clean programs, and — for better or worse — his approach internally is described as low-key.

Phillips, who seven years ago was a basketball coach, is the younger, charismatic type who might rally sagging morale at UW. Except that the preponderance of his credentials in a short career relate mostly to external needs of an athletic department.

Ted Leland, the athletic director at Stanford, believes Gore-Mann, who oversees a $51 million budget, is a rising star. But she has limited experience as Stanford's senior women's administrator, the position that connects with Pac-10 and national duties.

Understand, any of these people might turn into the perfect athletic director at Washington; the sporting landscape is littered with examples of top choices who bombed and No. 3 fallbacks (remember Don James?) who went platinum.

But the point is, that's betting on the come, and you wonder why Washington would find itself in that position. Nor is it a completely novel occurrence: When the Huskies went to replace Mike Lude in 1991, two of the finalists were Hedges, an associate AD, and Ball State AD Don Purvis — neither on anybody's candidate Who's Who.

There are the theories, of course. One of them hovers over a meeting room in Indianapolis, where today a UW delegation argues against major sanctions from the NCAA committee on infractions. The NCAA's final decision on penalties will follow in 4-6 weeks.

Unless the NCAA pounds Washington into serious submission, which seems unlikely, I'd argue it represents an opportunity for an incoming athletic director. The mess didn't happen on his/her watch, the offending parties are gone. Any regeneration that happens, he/she gets the credit.

A prominent athletic director mused this week over possible concerns about the UW, and whether the contractual commitment will reflect the pains of a rebuild. He speculated that a new hire should have at least a five-year contract and be paid perhaps $400,000 annually. Hedges earned about $250,000.

"What are you tackling?" he asked. "Do you have to change the culture?"

Even this is possible: The search committee winnows its list, and Emmert has his own people in mind. By this thinking, there's a list of people willing to endure a search process (their list), and the rest — usually the heavyweights — who aren't (his list).

If Emmert likes somebody unearthed by the committee, fine. If not, well, he's making the final call, anyway.

This week, a host on a Salt Lake City sports talk show ventured a guess on Hill's hesitancy. In Seattle, he said, there are the Mariners, and the Seahawks and the Sonics, and we all know what pro sports have done to erode college interest in metropolitan cities.

Nice try. Maybe it all changes if the Huskies have a couple of 4-7 football seasons, but Washington has taken the best shot of every other pro sport here and lived to tell about it. All it has to offer is a reasonably well-funded department, in a prestigious conference, in one of the nation's most beguiling cities.

If only Washington could get that across to prospective candidates.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com