There might not be anymore
protesters camped out in Chancellor Katehi’s foyer, but that didn’t
stop the Chancellor’s spokeswoman Dana Topousis from working on Picnic
Day. Topousis was asked by Davis Enterprise reporter Bruce Gallaudet for a comment on AggieSportsTalk.com’s revealing
the three finalist candidates to become UC Davis’ next athletic director. Topousis was sure to point out that there are
not three candidates, but rather five remaining. Topousis was not quoted on whether or not the
names were correct, however, employees in Mrak and the athletic department have
grown frustrated that names of potential candidates have leaked on
AggieSportsTalk.com.
The finalists, as reported by AggieSportsTalk.com,
included current Saint Mary’s College AD Mark Orr, current Tufts’ AD John
Morris and Stanford Senior Associate Athletic Director Kevin Blue.
Mark Orr played
football at California while Ron Gould, UC Davis’ current head football coach,
was an assistant. He also was the
athletic director when Saint Mary’s decided to drop its football program in
2004, a certain sticking point for many UCD football alums if Orr is to be
considered a serious final candidate.
Orr also was at the helm when the Gaels were sanctioned by the NCAA when
their men’s basketball team conducted illegal workouts. San Jose Mercury sports writer Jon Wilner
believed that Orr was as guilty as Bennett in not being able to catch and
rectify the NCAA violations.
Morris was the interim
athletic director at Colorado State and signed the deal to schedule a football
game against UC Davis in 2014. He was
also a Senior Associate Athletic Director at Washington, a Pac-12 connection to
Teresa Gould, who was at Cal for more than a decade. Morris has been in his current position since
June 15, 2015.
Kevin Blue graduated
from Stanford in 2005, earned his Ph.D from Michigan State in 2009 and has been
with Stanford athletics since 2009.
That leaves two
candidates who have not been named. Several
candidates could include former UC Santa Barbara AD Mark Massari and former
Portland State AD Torre Chisolm. Massari
left UCSB to become Oregon State’s deputy athletic director and Torre Chisolm has endured his fair share of criticism at Portland State.
One name that keeps
popping up during AST.com’s research is Cheryl Levick. The rumor is that Levick is interim AD Teresa
Gould’s top candidate. Levick was
brought in by Gould to evaluate the current state of the athletic department
and will present her vision for the department to Chancellor Katehi in the next
couple of weeks. Levick served as the
athletic director at Georgia State when they started an FBS football program. In order to meet the NCAA mandated 15,000
attendance for each home game to remain at the FBS level, Levick used acharitable ticket program to attempt to show Georgia State was averaging 15,000per home game. Georgia State actually only averaged around
7,000 “butts-in-seats” in the cavernous Georgia Dome which holds 71,228.
Teresa Gould, Levick
and Daniel Parker, the CEO of Parker Executive Search, the second firm being used by UC Davis athletics to conduct the AD search,
all have a history. Levick was an employee with Turnkey Search, an executive search firm from the end of 2014 through mid-2015. She now runs her own consulting and executive
search firm, CLL Business Enterprises.
The three were spotted together at an NCAA conference and it is not a
coincidence that Levick and Parker are on campus.
Some will have you
believe that the search has been skewed to bring the search committee and
Chancellor Katehi a weak list of candidates, giving Levick an opportunity to
use her face time with Katehi to pitch herself as the best alternative.
Curiously left off the
list was UC Davis alumnus and former Syracuse University AD Daryl Gross. Gross was a wide receiver for the Aggies from
1979 to 1981. Other applicants who did
not make the final cut were current Louisiana-Monroe AD Brian Wickstrom and
Montana State AD Peter Fields.
Several prominent alumni,
including former Aggie football player, University of Oregon head football
coach, and athletic director, Mike Bellotti wrote a blistering letter to search
committee chair Scott Carrell and Chancellor Katehi expressing his frustration
that Gross was not a finalist and was no longer being considered for the job. He was joined by many other football alumni
and prominent donors who have threatened to pull their financial support if
Daryl Gross is not named athletic director and Teresa Gould does not recuse
herself from the search process. The
argument against Teresa Gould’s involvement stems around her marriage to head
football coach Ron Gould, who is in year four of a five year contract with an
overall record of 9-25. We can assume
that due to the efforts of Bellotti and other football alums, Gross can be
considered one of the “final five.”
One thing is for
certain, what started as a mundane search has quickly escalated into nothing
short of a daytime soap opera.
