The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
Q&A with Chuck Neinas
08.15.2003 | Football
Chuck Neinas, a consultant and former Director of the College Football Association (CFA), made a stop at Longhorn practice Friday, as he completes a tour of institutions that have employed him as a consultant. Neinas aided The University of Texas in the hiring of head coach Mack Brown and has operated Neinas Sports Services, a college athletics consulting service, in Boulder, Colo., since 1997. Neinas spent 17 years at the CFA (1980-97), he served nine years as the commissioner of the Big Eight Conference (1971-79) and 10 years with the NCAA (1961-70).
What brings you to Austin? I'm making kind of a goodwill tour visiting a number of institutions that have employed my services in the past. It's something I've always wanted to do. I visited with Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, TCU, SMU, Baylor, the American Football Coaches Association, Conference USA, Texas A&M and now Texas.
Can you expand on what kind of consulting you do? I do coaching searches, such as assisting Texas with Mack Brown, and Oklahoma with Bob Stoops. I also do athletics director searches. I did (Texas) A&M, both AD Bill Byrne and football coach Dennis Franchione. Then, people sometimes ask me to come in and look at their program and talk about the future, and I've been a consultant with the American Football Coaches Association for some time, and currently, I'm being retained by Conference USA to help them sort through the realignment process.
Describe how your relationship with Coach Brown developed and how you came about helping him with the head coaching position at Texas. I've been Mack's friend for over 20 years. I've also been a longtime friend with DeLoss Dodds. Dodds and I worked together at the Big Eight Conference, and he was my top assistant before he went to Kansas State as athletics director. Mack and I vacation together, almost every year we do something in the spring or summer. So this has been something that has been growing through the years. DeLoss talked to me about Mack, and I talked to Mack and said 'Texas is interested,' and Mack was interested in Texas. It's one of the great traditional programs in college football, and they got together.
You were the executive director of the College Football Association from 1980-97. Can you describe your experience in that position? The CFA did a lot of things. Everyone associates it with television, and it's interesting that next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the famous Supreme Court decision that opened up television. It used to be you got one game a day and sometimes two. Whether it was, an Ivy League game or a Big 10 game, that's what you got. The University of Texas was very important in that, because when Peter Flawn was president, he challenged the NCAA and said they did not own the television rights to the Texas football team, those rights were owned by the university. That was the start of the lawsuit in which the universities challenged the NCAA on the property right theory. The CFA negotiated an excellent contract with NBC, and then the NCAA threatened the CFA members with probation and ineligibility of post-season competition. The result was the famous lawsuit.
The CFA did a lot of other things such as establish what was known as Proposition 48, removed boosters and alumni from the recruiting process, established a recruiting calendar that reduced off-campus recruiting from over 200 days down to less than eight weeks, established regular season eligibility rules where you had to make progress toward a degree, and a number of things like that.
With your time as a commissioner, can you speak to some of the major changes since that time? There have been a lot of changes. At one time, the conferences determined the number of grants on a sport basis, not the NCAA, so that changed. The NCAA rules are much more detailed in what institutions can do. College athletics as a whole have become much more popular, have gained greater exposure, has generated more interest and is higher profile. There are certainly many more dollars involved now than 20 to 30 years ago. The whole thing has become much more complex.
