The Colleges : SIZABLE FEAT : Big West Conference Comes a Long Way During Haney’s Busy First Year

Jim Haney can stroll through basketball arenas without a twinge of stress these days, and he gets to go to the first round of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament on business--two luxuries he didn’t have as a coach.

As he completes his first year as commissioner of the Big West Conference, Haney is so sunny an optimist that he calls the conference’s problems--such as its image as a league whose football teams struggle to remain in Division I-A--”opportunities for victory.”

He hasn’t always been so confidently optimistic, particularly not during his five years as basketball coach at Oregon. He laughs now about the days when he didn’t carry identification in order to cash a check: For better or worse, people in Eugene, Ore., knew exactly who he was.

He resigned from Oregon in 1983. His teams never won more than 13 games in a season, and he finished his coaching career with a winning percentage of .392, which among Oregon fans more likely is perceived as a losing percentage of .608.

Next came stints as an assistant to the vice president of player personnel with the Dallas Cowboys and as an assistant basketball coach at Kansas. Then Haney moved onto the fast track as a conference administrator, first as an assistant commissioner in the Metro Conference and then as commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference, which he is credited with saving, if not resurrecting.

Now, as the fourth commissioner of the 20-year-old league formerly known as Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., Haney, 40, deserves a large part of the credit for the small matter of accomplishing the heretofore unimagineable: He has managed to get the conference--once cumbersomely known as the PCAA if it was known at all--mentioned hundreds upon hundreds of times in the same breath with the Big East and Big Ten.

That came as the result of a television package with ESPN that put Big West basketball games on the national cable sports network as part of “Big Monday,” ESPN’s three-game Monday night package beginning with a Big East game, followed by a Big Ten game, and finally, four times this season, followed by a Big West game.

ESPN, which had never broadcast a regular-season PCAA game, broadcast nine Big West games this year and will expand its Big Monday coverage next year.

That ESPN package--which stemmed from a brainstorm Haney had as he sat on a plane and connected the “Big” conferences with a television package--was a coup that not only solidified the choice of Big West as the conference’s new name, but also helped publicize it. Big Monday was promoted in Sports Illustrated, as well as on ESPN and CNN.

The name change had been in the works under previous commissioner Lew Cryer for months, and most people believe it would have been approved regardless of who replaced Cryer, who resigned. But the ESPN deal, a Haney brainchild negotiated by Creative Sports Marketing, a group he brought on board, was the final factor in the choice of Big West over other possibilities that included “Wild West.”

“People felt there was some confusion over who the PCAA was, and now there’s a clear understanding that there is a Big West in the West,” Haney said. “Although people may not be able to go through and name every team, there are very few people who could go through and name all the institutions in the various conferences.”

But an identity and awareness of who is in the conference is a small part of what the Big West--long lost in the shadow particularly of the Pacific 10 and to some extent of the Western Athletic Conference--is seeking.

“Ultimately, what you’re looking for is trying to create your niche,” Haney said. “We’re not trying to overshadow anybody or remove somebody out of their public perception as a very good conference. What we’re trying to seek is recognition of the tremendous accomplishments of this conference, the breadth of what we do in men’s and women’s sports. The conference needs to receive that credit.”

The name change and the big-splash ESPN deal have been the most heralded events of Haney’s--and the Big West’s--first year. Haney’s pursuit of television paid off in other ways. UNLV, working through Creative Sports Marketing, played six games televised on the three major national networks. Creative Sports Marketing struck a 51-event deal with Prime Ticket, a regional cable network, that will include three Big West softball games.

Those have been the most visible hallmarks of a busy first year, but Haney made his presence notable in other ways.

Last spring, he won the admiration of the league’s sports information directors by sitting through a tedious planning meeting before the track championships at Logan, Utah.

He has started a 12,000-circulation tabloid newspaper about the conference, and has been very visible at events, not only at schools near the Big West’s offices in Santa Ana, but also in Logan and in Las Cruces, N.M., the nether reaches of the conference.

During the basketball season, he made news by issuing an official reprimand to Utah State Coach Kohn Smith for much-publicized derogatory remarks about the UNLV basketball program. He also had private conversations with other coaches about their public comments about such topics as officiating and scheduling.

“If you want a good product, you can’t go around tearing down what you’ve got,” Haney said. “We can only rise to the level that our conference perceives itself.”

And at the conference basketball tournament, in a gesture that some found inspiring and others found uncomfortable, Haney stood by after the final in Long Beach Arena, and as paramedics in the stands worked to revive Armen Sarafian, the friend of UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian who collapsed and died of cardiac arrest, Haney took the microphone and offered a prayer.

For all its public progress in the past year, the Big West suffered a big blow to its ego at the end of the basketball season when New Mexico State, a team that finished second in the conference regular season and tournament and lost two close games to Nevada Las Vegas in the final week of the season, was left out of the NCAA tournament.

For a conference that is seeking to build its reputation on the strength of its nonrevenue sports and its basketball, that was a serious setback. The previous year, three teams had made the tournament--UNLV, Utah State and UC Santa Barbara.

How much did it mean to the Big West?

“About a quarter of a million dollars,” Haney said, referring to the NCAA payoff for making the tournament.

More serious, though, was the effect on the conference’s reputation.

“We cannot have the second-place team in our conference being on the bubble to get into the NCAA field,” Haney said. “We have to play better nonconference schedules. We have to be successful in our nonconference schedules.. . . We need to come down to the point where the second- and third-place teams are not on the bubble but clearly worthy of being in the field, and if there’s a bubble team, it’s our fourth or fifth.”

Basketball, after all--along with such sports at which the conference excels, including baseball, women’s volleyball, women’s basketball and water polo--is supposed to help carry the big-time image for the football programs, many of which struggle to draw fans at home.

Attendance, because of an NCAA rule requiring teams to average 17,000 at home or 20,000 home and away at least one year in four to maintain I-A status, is a particular concern.

“Other than Fresno and San Jose we don’t have any institutions who historically put the bodies in for home games that would suggest to one that we’re in good shape,” Haney said. “For us to maintain our 1-A status, we have to do other things such as going on the road to play with no return, and play games with institutions that are going to draw big numbers, which in many cases means our chances of victory are not great.”

UNLV and New Mexico State, two schools that were down to two years to fulfill the attendance requirement, met it last season. Cal State Fullerton, which averages fewer than 5,000 at home, has fulfilled the requirement with away games such as Florida and Louisiana State.

“We have four more years before we have to meet it again,” Haney said. “We’re stable as a I-A football conference. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, as institutions, conferences and individuals. In our case, our weakness is attendance. We either can crumble under it and say he we’ll never make it, or we can overcome it. To overcome it means you have to be willing to do certain things. Our institutions are willing.”

Still, despite some very successful years such as Cal State Fullerton in 1984, the image of Big West football is not thriving.

“We obviously constantly are being asked about the status of our football,” Haney said. “The feeling is if we get the focus off wonderment as to whether we’re going to be I-A, as we did by meeting our qualification in 1988, that it will give us breathing room to grow. Rather than be apologetic for our football, having to address ‘Are you a I-A conference or aren’t you?’ we can just say we’re I-A for four more years.. . . Ultimately, success is the key. We can do all kinds of promotions, institutions can do all kinds of giveaways--give away little footballs, all those promotions to try to put people in--but there’s not a substitute for success.”

With the first year under Haney behind, the Big West is planning for next year. The conference is talking with ESPN about increased football coverage. There are recommendations to make changes in the basketball tournament, perhaps moving the championship games to Sunday and likely doing away with the odd bracketing under which the teams are re-seeded after every round, a procedure that favors the favorite and makes it difficult for fans to plan to attend. On the women’s side, there is a good chance that San Diego State will withdraw from the conference to join a WAC women’s conference that is in the works. That would mean more changes.

But after last year’s name change and television impact, Haney says, the next changes will be more subtle.

“People, when they judge, tend to judge a moment in time,” Haney said. “But we’re not a moment in time. We’re a process. When I sit in judgment, I don’t see the conference as far as where it is now. I see it as where it’s going to be. I don’t have to box the conference into a moment in time. It’s unimportant. My vision is where it’s going.”