Columnist Dean Juipe: UNLV sets its sights on AD too low

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, July 30, 2003 | 8:56 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

If this was happening to the "other guy" -- a rival, or an adversary -- it would be humorous in a sadistic and demented way. But it's happening to UNLV, which is a little too close to home to be funny to most of us.

The search process for an athletic director at the school was botched from the outset and inherently flawed.

And now that it has reached its final stage, its shortcomings are, more than ever, painfully obvious.

UNLV will hire a good man, yet it will have missed a number of opportunities to have hired a great man.

It will hire a man who can see, yet it will have missed the chance to hire a man with vision.

Wayne Hogan, the AD at Montana, is the apparent front-runner -- he was paraded around the campus Tuesday -- and one of three remaining finalists for the UNLV position. Mike Bohn, the AD at Idaho, and Mike Hamrick, the AD at East Carolina, are the other survivors; two previously announced finalists already have withdrawn.

But more qualified men than these were never considered by UNLV's 16-person search committee, simply because school president Carol Harter limited the field to persons who were currently athletic directors at other schools.

As such, capable assistant athletic directors at major schools were advised not to apply, as were any and all persons with local ties.

The result: UNLV was inundated with applicants from lesser schools. Hence, even the most industrious of these applicants has never faced the type of problems and the type of potential that UNLV regularly encounters and/or enjoys.

Guess what? The ADs at Texas and Southern California will never be tempted to apply for the AD's position at UNLV, yet sometimes their chief associates will. But when UNLV denied anyone but sitting ADs the right to apply, it lost out on highly regarded assistants from Texas and USC -- to name at least two that we know of -- who had an interest in the position.

This is significant in that it can be fairly stated that an assistant at Texas and USC is going to have more responsibilities and greater involvement in major-conference issues than the AD at Montana, Idaho or East Carolina.

Harter, however, failed to recognize the obvious and set criteria for applicants that was certain to limit the search committee's effectiveness.

For an analogous situation, consider a Major League Baseball team in need of a manager. What do you think it would do? Hire the best Little League manager in the country? Or, perhaps, hire someone with major-league experience who is familiar with the terrain?

No disrespect to Hogan, who seems to be a personable guy from a distance, but UNLV is going the Little League route.

He's going to be brought here as Harter's new pet underling, no matter that he may have been only the 50th best choice for the job had any and all applicants been welcomed.

We know of several better qualified potential applicants and we know they were told to not bother.

Pretty funny, isn't it? A big school like UNLV with such immense potential, content to flail in mediocrity.

They have to be laughing about this somewhere.