If you want to compete in big-time college athletics, you need support from people of color. And more than ever, that color is green.
Money in Hawaii is kind of like athletic talent. There’s an abundance of it here, but getting enough of both to the University of Hawaii to help make the Rainbows consistent winners is very challenging. If you solve that problem, the rest of it will fall into place.
Just like the coaches have to try to recruit the Manti Te’os and Tua Tagovailoas, even though they know the answer is probably going to be a polite no, hopefully the fundraisers try their best with people like Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and other mega-rich but less famous folks who live at least part-time in Hawaii.
You never know … maybe the new name, image, likeness rules might change the way some millionaires and billionaires view supporting college athletes.
The only thing I have in common with UH president David Lassner besides our first name is that I lived briefly in a suburb of Chicago just a couple of miles from one he lived in, a very long time ago. On rare occasions we end up sitting next to each other at basketball and volleyball games, and exchange some brief, cordial conversation — conversation that never gets anywhere close to thoughts on how to write sports columns or how to raise money and run universities.
The only time I form a search advisory committee is when I lose my cellphone — unlike Lassner, who does so when he loses a high-level executive, like an athletic director.
This seems to be standard operating procedure in the academic realm and parts of the big business world. Despite witnessing a few of them in action, I’ve never quite understood all the nuances of search committees.
My semi-educated guess is that the basic theory is smart people know a lot of other smart people … so, if you form a committee of smart people who also know something about college sports, it improves the odds of finding the best person to run your athletic department.
The committee to help Lassner find, choose and/or validate the replacement for David Matlin — who, depending on what you believe, either retired or was forced out of his job as the Hawaii AD — is comprised of two high-level people from the academic side of campus, two successful execs from the Honolulu business community, two veteran UH head coaches, and a state Supreme Court judge who is also a former UH basketball player.
I know only a couple of them, and they are people I admire and respect greatly. As a group, as far as I can tell they all love the university so much that they bleed green.
However, I receive complaints pretty much daily from various people — who also love UH — about the committee’s composition. The perception is that the group would favor a promotion from within UH, with a preconceived result rather than a thorough wide casting of the net to catch the best prospect if it isn’t already at Manoa.
The committee is diverse in many ways, but not in others. Former UH football coach June Jones brought up a good point in his Star-Advertiser guest column last week: Why is there so little — or no — representation of Blacks and Polynesians on these committees when they account for such a high percentage of the school’s student-athletes?
Another thing: Whether you love football or hate it, it pulls the athletic department train. Even when the team isn’t winning and doesn’t have a full-size stadium it brings in money via its FBS and conference affiliations, which help the sports that don’t generate enough revenue to meet expenses (or almost all of them).
If you’re going to have coaches on a committee to help find an athletic director, the football head coach, Timmy Chang, belongs on that committee. There are also dozens of former UH football players who have gone on to success that could help.
You need folks who bleed green, and folks who have green. Rich people tend to have rich friends.
