Who is in charge at UH?

We know who made the announcement in the recent basketball firings, but the questions of the moment surround who will be calling the next shots in the University of Hawaii’s turbulent athletic program.

Ostensibly, it is the athletic director, Ben Jay, who is charged with operating the 21-team, $32 million enterprise. But the stunning U-turn that saw basketball coach Gib Arnold go from the prospect of a three-year extension and pay hike this summer to termination last week suggests we could be in for some behind-the-scenes jockeying.

The kind that UH’s history in such cases hints that we could be in for more changes.

It was Jay, under pressure from boosters, who moved ahead in the face of an ongoing NCAA investigation for a contract extension that would have bound UH to Arnold through 2017 at a cost of $1,095,000.

But three key changes, and the chain reaction they produced, brought Arnold’s tenure to a screeching halt two weeks before the start of the 2014-15 season and before the NCAA’s notice of allegations arrived.

The landscape was altered when Tom Apple, who hired and oversaw Jay and was said to have been favorably disposed to the contract extension, was removed as Manoa chancellor on Sept. 1. He was replaced by interim appointee Robert Bley-Vroman, dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature.

In between, attorney Jeff Portnoy, who was appointed to the Board of Regents by Gov. Neil Abercrombie late last year, assumed an active chairmanship of the restructured board’s Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics.

In apparent consultation with UH President David Lassner, Portnoy and other regents, Bley-Vroman kept Arnold’s extension tabled until boldly, and correctly, announcing the termination of the coach and long-time assistant Brandyn Akana on Oct. 28.

Except for a six-paragraph statement that concludes with the assertion Lassner and the regents "stand behind the athletics director and chancellor as they make these difficult decisions," there has been no public announcement of the process at which they were arrived at or explanation of the reasoning that went into them.

Nor was there an accounting of why, if the decision to terminate was made more than a week before the announcement, there was such a scramble to name a season-long replacement afterward.

The last time we witnessed something remotely like this was when then-AD Jim Donovan was overruled on the hiring process for a football coach.

Past examples tell us there are few things as potentially combustible around UH as the whiff of a power vacuum in the state’s only Division I athletic program. No place else on campus do so many agendas clash or so many hands grab for a piece of the action.

This is, after all, a campus where Washington Place has been known to counsel the AD on the preferred choice of sportscasters, state Capitol inhabitants aren’t above meddling in everything else and there is a hui created for every opening. Often before there are openings.

There are no limits to the challenges facing the financially struggling, under-performing UH athletic program these days. Questions about who is in charge don’t need to be among them.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.