Wanted: Director of No-Win Situation

Here’s a job opening that will have them beating down doors at Cal State Fullerton.

Wanted: One athletic director.

Salary: Salary? Who can talk salary? There is no money here. None. Zip. Nada. The school nearly had to drop football two weeks ago. The athletic department is $150,000 in the hole. There is also a hole on the north end of the campus, which eventually will house a $10-million football stadium, which would have been interesting with no football team. In order to keep football, you will be entrusted to oversee a $2.3-million fund-raising campaign over the next two years. Your predecessors, unfettered by the constraints of a nationwide economic recession, never raised more than $460,000 in a single year.

Perks: You get your own office. For obvious reasons, we keep it on the first floor. We know why Ed Carroll has decided to leave, trading in a no-win situation at Fullerton for a less-stress, maybe-win situation at UC Irvine.

We don’t know why he needed six years to decide.

That’s a lot of repetition--six years of banging your head against the wall. Maybe that’s why Carroll never stopped smiling. Ed Carroll, the human happy-face button, the Dan Quayle of athletic directors. Carroll couldn’t stop smiling because he had apparently knocked himself silly.

Six years ago, Carroll actually campaigned for the job of Fullerton athletic director. When his boss, Lynn Eilefson, finished his debt to society, Carroll bounced from office to office in the athletic department, trying to roust support.

Invariably, Carroll’s pitch would invoke the same response--a blank stare and a question:

Why?

Hadn’t Carroll looked around and seen the bodies lumped on the floor--bodies of the proud and the few, the coaches who tried to build winners at Sisyphus U.?

Bobby Dye had to be hospitalized. Jim Colletto had to be carried away in a car after collapsing at a game at Fresno State. George McQuarn quit, un-quit and quit again--the sure sign of a stable personality. Augie Garrido got out with his sanity but lost it in Illinois, which is why he’s back today.

The strain wore down athletic directors too. Neale Stoner, Mike Mullally, Eilefson--all gone in short time. Carroll must not have noticed. An accountant first and always, Carroll was too busy punching buttons and pushing numbers.

Be careful, you might get what you ask for. Carroll did, and now he knows. An old wrestler at Fullerton, he figured he was set with the basics--primed for the struggle and all that. But he never planned for a Texas steel-cage match, loser leaves town.

Carroll had to fend off body slams every time he turned around. Within months in 1988, Garrido and McQuarn both quit on him. Carroll’s tenure coincided with that of a university president, Jewel Plummer Cobb, who was decidedly ambivalent about sports. He was hit with budget cuts. He had to dump some programs. He became a heavy when all he wanted was to be liked and pretend everything was OK.

Carroll dealt with the defections admirably; he replaced Garrido with Larry Cochell and got Fullerton back to the College World Series, he replaced McQuarn with John Sneed and kept the basketball program on a winning keel.

The other land mines he didn’t handle so well.

The one that really blew up on him was the football program. Carroll was the architect of the infamous “body bag games,” the Fullerton-at-Auburn and Fullerton-at-LSU debacles that added lines to Gene Murphy’s face and lined the path to last year’s 1-11 meltdown. Carroll did it for the money, plain and simple. He sold out Murphy, and he sold his university’s soul, but Carroll was able to live with it because those paychecks kept the fencing program alive another year.

Already the department’s sacrificial lamb, Fullerton football was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice last month when the athletics council recommended the program be scrapped so that other sports might live. The cross-fire that followed blindsided Carroll, tipping the first domino that would lead to his resignation.

In the darkest hours of limbo, when Fullerton football seemed assuredly a goner, Carroll allegedly gave Murphy notice to call his assistants off the recruiting trail and release recruits from their obligations. Effectively, the patient was pulled off life-support.

Then, Milton A. Gordon, the new university president, gave football an 11th-hour reprieve, and the patient was revived, but not without irreparable damage. Some recruits were lost for good, and Carroll was fingered as the fall guy.

Now Carroll is gone, but the same problems remain--along with the birth of some new ones. Right now, Fullerton finds itself in the middle of the most massive, most critical fund-raising drive in the history of its athletic program--and it has no athletic director. The school can’t afford an extended search, but it can’t afford a quick fix, either.

You wouldn’t wish this job on your worst enemy, but remarkably, two men still in good standing within the community have been mentioned as potential successors.

One is Ralph Barkey, the former Titan Athletic Foundation director who is now athletic director at Sonoma State, the only school to lose in football to Fullerton in 1990 and, notably, Gordon’s last stop before his arrival in Orange County.

The other is . . . and get ready for this . . . Neale Stoner.

Think about it. He knows the area. He knows the course. He knows the obstacles. And he could come quickly. Right now, Stoner isn’t doing much of anything, just running the California Raisin Bowl, not too tough of a job. If Fresno State’s in it, you sell out. If not, you draw 20,000. What’s the challenge in that?

Of course, Stoner had his troubles at Illinois--the football team wound up on probation, among other things--but Orange County is the most forgiving place on the planet. Doug Rader got a second chance here. Richard Nixon has his own library here.

What’s a little out-of-state transgression among old friends? Besides, Fullerton is still on this recycling kick. If the Titans can bring Augie back, why can’t they bring back the man who hired Augie the first time around?

No doubt, Fullerton will try. Just remember, though: This is a school that seldom gets what it wants--and even when it does, the reality rarely lives up to the promise originally envisioned in the mind’s eye.

Ed Carroll knows.