With the Big 12 Conference in danger of disintegration last summer and commissioner Dan Beebe under fire, University of Oklahoma president David Boren placed a call to an old friend, Chuck Neinas.
Neinas, 79, was doing occasional consulting work but otherwise was in semi-retirement at his home near Boulder.
Boren laughed last week as he recalled the conversation. “I said, ‘If your old conference came calling, saying, “Help, help, come help us,” would you consider it?’ “
When the offer came several weeks later, Neinas talked it over with his wife, economist Patty Pacey, and accepted.
“I decided it was an interesting opportunity,” Neinas said recently from Dallas. “I have so many friends in the conference.”
Said Boren: “It’s kind of like the old firetruck driver hearing the bell. He answered the bell.”
Neinas started as the Big 12’s interim commissioner Oct. 3 and envisions that his tenure will last “in the neighborhood of six months.”
In the last six weeks alone, Texas A&M accepted an invitation to the Southeastern Conference, TCU was accepted as a Big 12 replacement, Missouri has started on a path to leave the Big 12 for the SEC and West Virginia has been invited to replace the Tigers. On Neinas’ watch, Big 12 schools agreed to a joint resolution, clearing up some of the potential disputes tied to revenue sharing and television rights, including Texas’ Longhorn Network.
“He was the shuttle diplomat in this effort,” Boren said. “It was jointly offered by OU and Texas, and that has helped usher in an era of strong harmony between OU and Texas. Chuck was instrumental, because he’s so trusted by both schools. . . . These are reforms we’ve been talking about for 10 years. So here he comes in, and within about two weeks he helps us reach common agreement.”
Boren added, “Someone joked one day that we ought to send (Neinas) over to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now that he’s brought this all together.”
Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds was assistant Big Eight commissioner under Neinas.
“He absolutely knows the people,” Dodds said. “He knows the history. He’s so good with people, he makes people work together. And he’s loving it. He’s absolutely loving it. It’s a shot for him to put a mark again on a conference he was so proud of.”
The Wisconsin native has been commissioner of the Big 12’s predecessor, the Big Eight; executive director of the College Football Association; and head of Neinas Sports Services, a consulting and headhunting firm tied to the hiring of many current prominent football coaches, such as Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, Florida’s Urban Meyer, Louisiana State’s Les Miles and Texas’ Mack Brown. He also served as chairman of the board for Ascent Entertainment Group and acting CEO in 1999-2000 until the company was sold to Liberty Media Group, which soon passed the Pepsi Center, Nuggets and Avalanche on to Stan Kroenke.
Often recognized on national “most- powerful” lists, his level of influence in college sports is much higher than his profile.
Tough bosses, tough lessons
Raised in Marshfield, Wis., Neinas attended Central State College in Stevens Point (now Wisconsin-Stevens Point), played basketball and enlisted in the Naval Reserves during the Korean War. He was called into active service in January of his sophomore year. He didn’t serve in combat but was on the Queenfish and Tilefish submarines in the Pacific.
His commander on the Tilefish, Giles Featherstone Bunn III, punctured the pretensions of those who wanted everything done by the book, but he ran a tight ship when needed.
“He knew how to get the best out of his men,” Neinas said. “I took those lessons with me.”
After returning to Central State and playing basketball as a sophomore, Neinas transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He helped out the Badgers’ radio voice, Art Lentz, and when Lentz left to join the U.S. Olympic Committee in early 1956, Neinas took over the play-by-play role while a student and stayed in that position, for football and basketball, after graduation.
In August 1961, he joined the NCAA. The entire staff was four secretaries, plus four administrators. “I was the eighth employee, and now they have 500,” Neinas said with a laugh.
He worked under legendary long- time NCAA executive director Walter Byers and served as director of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and the College World Series.
“Walter was not the easiest person to work for,” Neinas said. “He was demanding. As a result, you learned how to do things and do them right. . . . It was a lot different when I worked for him than it was later, when you couldn’t have coffee cups on your desk or anything like that. When I worked for Walter, at 5 o’clock, he’d say, ‘Neinas, get in here and join me for a drink.’ And he’d light up his little cigar.”
Neinas left the NCAA in 1971 to become Big Eight commissioner. Fissures soon appeared in his relationship with Byers, including when Neinas testified before Congress that he believed the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions had too much power, and that investigative and enforcement functions needed to be separated.
In 1980, Neinas accepted the executive director’s job of the CFA, which was organized to bring together the major football programs in an attempt to have better control over their own rules and ultimately television packages. The schools remained NCAA members, but it was an upstart subgroup, minus the Pacific 10 and the Big Ten schools. Neinas moved its office from Kansas City to Boulder in 1981.
“We were instrumental in prompting the reorganization of the NCAA into Division I, II and III, and eventually Division I into I-A and I-AA,” Neinas said. “It was so that people who were affected by the legislation voted on the legislation.”
It’s most remembered for backing the lawsuit against the NCAA hoping to break up the organization’s monopoly on television rights. It was an era of limited games on national TV.
The lawsuit came after the CFA reached a tentative agreement for its own four-year, $180 million television package with NBC for the 1982-85 seasons. Each of the 63 CFA schools would receive $1 million or more in TV revenue. The NCAA Council ruled that any CFA members in the agreement would be kicked out of postseason competition in all sports. That killed it. The resulting lawsuit included dueling Neinas and Byers appearances on the witness stand. The CFA interests won, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1984.
That verdict opened the floodgates for college football on television.
Years later, Neinas was checking in with Wayne Duke, the retired Big Ten commissioner he worked with at the NCAA. Duke had been critical of the CFA’s militant stands.
“I asked Wayne if he was attending any college football games, because he’d had some physical problems,” Neinas said. “No, he said, it was really difficult for him to get around. And he said, ‘You know, I can sit at home and watch three Big Ten games on Saturdays on TV.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Duke, I was the son of a (gun) who opened it up.”
Neinas was laughing when he told that story.
Camaraderie nonexistent
The CFA eventually dissolved in June 1997, after conferences began selling their own television packages. “We basically completed our agendas,” Neinas said. “It did things in a practical, realistic manner. The NCAA doesn’t always do that. The NCAA has basically legislated common sense out of the rule book.”
Neinas got into the consulting business, helping universities select coaches and athletic directors, often acting as a go-between. Soon after, he didn’t make the hires, but communicated with, checked out, and brought viable candidates to the table.
“It’s about confidentiality and trust,” Neinas said. “My motto was to try to move forward in a manner in which no one gets embarrassed.”
In June 1999, Ascent’s board of directors asked Neinas — a stockholder in the company that owned the Nuggets, Avalanche and Pepsi Center and other entertainment interests — to take over as chairman and CEO after an announced sale to Bill Laurie was set aside. He served as CEO for six months and chairman of the board until the next year, through another failed sale attempt to Denver businessman Donald Sturm. Finally, the sale of Ascent to Liberty Media went through that March.
This year, Neinas was stepping away from consulting to spend more time traveling when the Big 12 offer came.
One of the challenges he faces is keeping the remaining Big 12 members happy, including Texas with its Longhorn Network.
“We want to be in the Big 12,” said Texas’ Dodds. “And what I think he’s good at is getting consensus that we want to build it from here, with the addition of TCU and whether we want to go 10 or 12, and who we want to get, that kind of thing. He’s a stabilizing kind of guy. He’s so good at it because that’s what he’s done all his life in the NCAA, Big Eight and CFA.”
Even as the realignment maneuvering helped bring him back in the spotlight, Neinas regrets the circumstances.
“I find it disappointing,” Neinas said. “Conferences used to be close-knit groups working together, and now they’ve almost become scheduling alliances. The camaraderie that was so prevalent when I was with the Big Eight and even the CFA doesn’t seem to exist today. I think I enjoyed the halcyon days of college athletics.”
But he’s giving them one last shot.
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
A stabilizing rudder
Neinas comes out of semi-retirement to steer Big 12’s direction
Neinas sounds off
Chuck Neinas, current Big 12 interim commissioner, gives his views.
On taking the Big 12 job: “I had so many relationships in the conference, and, after all, this is an offshoot of the Big Eight, which I devoted 10 years to. It all kind of works together.”
When he felt the NCAA got sidetracked: “When it started to become involved in such detailed legislation that they regulated unnecessarily in some areas. They’re looking at legislation that is really not pragmatic or effective. Part of that is membership’s fault because sometimes the institutions or conferences should take care of their own. Instead they say, ‘Let’s get some national legislation.’ And the thing that is of concern to me is that the people who are really knowledgeable about athletics I think are playing a lesser role. The athletic directors are involved directly with the problems of college athletics, but their role appears to be minimized within the NCAA structure.”
On the landscape of the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A): “There are some institutions that really don’t belong in Division I-A simply because financially they are not in a position to be competitive and they think there’s a stigma attached to being I-AA (currently the Football Championship Subdivision). For example, the schools that are having to lean so heavily on state aid and student fees and institutional support in a time when higher education has so many economic problems. They find it increasingly difficult to maintain a program at the I-A level.”
What it will take to turn around the Colorado football program: “Patience and more financial support — in facilities and in general bringing more to the table.”
On former Colorado coach Dan Hawkins, whom Neinas helped recommend to CU: “Dan Hawkins is a good person. When I do a search, what I want to make sure of is that the people involved are good people. You can’t predict wins and losses. Each program is different. Who knew that Urban Meyer would be so good. Or Les Miles. Or Bobby Stoops.”
How long college football coaches should be allowed to get their programs going: “At least four years, sometimes five. The first year, you can write off. You have a new staff and a new system. Then the second year, you can start recruiting your own. The third year, you’re going to see some progress, and then in year four, you should be able to judge if the program is going to be on the right path.”
