Columnist Ron Kantowski: UNLV’s search for an athletic director winds up in backwoods

Friday, July 25, 2003 | 10 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

Is it too late to apply for the UNLV athletic director's job?

The guy who sat in the high-backed chair before John Robinson was Charlie Cavagnaro, a former sports writer, so why not me?

That way, when the list of candidates are revealed on the 12th of Never, when Henderson freezes over, or when university president Dr. Carol Harter returns from vacation, whichever comes first, UNLV can say it doesn't have any big-name candidates, but at least it has a long-name one.

So far, nobody on the search committee is talking about the finalists. But if the few rumors making the rounds about their identities are accurate, maybe they are talking and it's just that nobody is listening.

The only names to surface in conjunction with the job are so vanilla we won't repeat them here, because there's a 99-percent chance you've never heard of them anyway. Instead, we'll mention the schools at which they currently are serving: Montana, Idaho, Toleda, East Carolina and Saint Louis.

Isn't that half of the Small Potatoes Conference?

It's not that you can't make potato salad out of small spuds. It's just that it usually takes a little longer. With the athletic program losing money and all that budget-balancing "soft money" yet to be raised, I'm not sure UNLV can afford to be patient.

Of course, it should be noted that the last guy who sat in the chair was bigger than Mister Potato Head himself, and he wasn't able to get the job done, either. In fairness to John Robinson, he also had a football team to coach, and an ailing wife to comfort, and if you switch the order, those ultimately turned out to his biggest priorities.

Nobody's blaming him for that, because those are the things he knows most about. But I have to confess that though it has been about 25 years since anybody thought one man could handle both jobs, adding AD to Robinson's responsibilities made a certain amount of sense.

After all, the biggest chore for an athletic director is and always will be to raise money, and you had to figure that Robinson, given his star quotient and ability to charm, would be able to get into the pockets of some pretty high rollers.

Upon taking over, his stated goal was to raise $10 million in "soft money," i.e., charitable donations from guys with fat wallets who have never needed binoculars to watch a football game. At the time he stepped down, he had raised roughly $1.5 million.

No need to bring out the chains and measure. Punt it.

Whether raising $10 million in bonus money is a reasonable goal is debatable, especially with all these palpable bad vibrations for the athletic program within the community. But one of the higher-ups at UNLV told me that's what it will take to remain solvent and competitive with something left over for the rainy days that, lucky for UNLV, around here happen about as often as a perfect game.

It's also the real reason, I'm told, that Jim Schlossnagle decided to step down as Rebels baseball coach long before his job here was finished. He soured on the idea of constantly having to raise his own spending cash when there were other schools -- such as TCU, for instance -- that have booster clubs that do that for you.

So maybe what UNLV needs is not a big-name athletic director, but one whose surname is followed by a III or IV, or some other stuffy designation.

Anybody know if any of the Rockefeller boys are looking for a hobby?