Eagles need stability when hiring new athletic director

So the trickle of names is already a flood.

Turns out that despite the initial backlash among Mike Burns’ many good friends in the coaching game after his mishandled firing at Eastern Washington University, there are many others who have no reservations about succeeding him.

Prominent coaches. Unknowns. Proven winners, promising assistants. The ambitious, the repetitious, the dubious.

And it’s important EWU hire the right one.

But not as important as the hire after that.

For all that rides on the selection of Eastern’s next basketball coach, there is more at stake in this go-round in the placement of a new athletic director – even though not a soul will pass through a turnstile to watch him or her balance a budget or chair a staff meeting or dig out from an avalanche of NCAA white paper.

Look, I’m a labor guy. The best bosses are the ones who don’t get in the way.

But the events of the last year suggest that Eastern athletics has come to another one of those crossroads in its pursuit of the Division I dream and that it can’t afford the crisis in leadership which has been keeping it in the headlines.

And since the headhunter the school has contracted with is taking his own sweet time getting started, I thought I’d jump into the recruiting breach. With just a couple of phone calls I found an eminently qualified athletic director already on his way to Spokane County with a truckload full of family belongings.

But Bill Moos isn’t biting.

“My wife Kendra and I were at the Pac-10 meetings where they recognized me for 25 years as a student-athlete and administrator,” said Oregon’s outgoing AD. “People are asking, ‘Why would you leave collegiate athletics to raise cattle?’

“I told them I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather step in it than put up with it.”

Moos is riding off into, well, the sunrise of a new stage of his life. He split with Oregon after 12 years of raising the Ducks’ athletic profile to an unprecedented – and for some rivals, annoying – prominence, receiving a settlement of nearly $2 million over 10 years both in recognition of his service and of his appeal to rival schools. So there are stipulations barring him from seeking employment at other BCS schools or from soliciting Oregon donors on another school’s behalf.

So he and Kendra have purchased 56 acres south of Valleyford and he’s going to be a cowboy. And he doesn’t need EWU or its headaches.

But maybe EWU needs him, or someone like him.

It’s not suggested as a long-term marriage, necessarily. But to an outsider, it appears that EWU might be served best not by the next young comer with a nice necktie and a hearty handshake but by someone with gravitas, even if it’s only for a year to set some standards and expectations – and an ethic.

It’s nothing novel. Nine years ago, Cal State Northridge brought in Sam Jankovich – who once ran Washington State, Miami and the New England Patriots – to be that steadying force. When a million-dollar budget deficit was discovered at Montana a few years ago, former football coach Don Read was brought back to right the ship.

Each stayed a year. Neither was easing into retirement. UM football coach Bobby Hauck recalled often showing up at the office at 5 a.m. and finding Read already there.

It might seem to run counter to the idea of establishing stability, but in both cases it’s exactly what those programs got – stabilized. And Moos, who was the AD at Montana before he went to Oregon, insisted that stability can be had, even at the Big Sky Conference level.

“Eastern had it with Dick Zornes, because he loved the school,” he said. “They had it with Ron Raver, with John Johnson. How many of those kinds of guys are out there, I don’t know.”

But it doesn’t have to amount to going back in time, either. There is a perpetual vibe at Eastern that what ails it athletically would be solved simply with more money, but in fact the best moments the school has experienced have come when a team – when the program – has become a cause.

“If you’re getting somebody who genuinely wants to be at a place, they’re not going to come in and break up the furniture,” Moos said. “Because usually people who do that are looking for the next job.

“Yeah, usually in a Big Sky situation, you’re going to have an AD who wants to make himself or herself marketable for a BCS job and what you’re hoping for is five or six years of good energy. You want him to surround himself with good people, develop the area of compliance and try to create some stability in the coaching staff. And then you try and find your own niche in a market that’s pretty competitive.

“Somebody with some creativity could have some fun at Eastern.”

But not Moos – although he’s already doing some consulting for athletic departments, services he took advantage of both at Oregon and UM.

“I think those days are done,” he laughed. “But for a little advice, I’m there for the asking.”