The future of Utah coach Ron McBride and the Ute football program may all come down to a long-distance phone call tonight.
McBride, on a recruiting trip for Utah in Southern California, has imposed a Tuesday night deadline on the University of Hawaii to make him a job offer for the school's head coaching vacancy.McBride is one of the top two candidates for the University of Hawaii coaching position that he has coveted nearly as much as the job he has had for nine years. He says Hawaii is his second-favorite place to live, after Utah.
And while not sure what he'll do if the Hawaii job is offered, he seems somewhat firm about holding Hawaii to a Tuesday-night deadline of sorts.
McBride wants a quick decision because this is prime recruiting time. He says he'll call Hawaii from somewhere in Southern Cal Tuesday to find out if the selection committee has made a decision.
Hawaii will have interviewed six of its seven finalists by then.
The selection committee plans to fly to San Diego on Wednesday to talk with No. 7: Chargers' interim coach June Jones, a former Rainbow player and assistant and perhaps the No. 1 target for the coaching job. Jones is waiting to find out if he'll be named Chargers' head coach, a decision that could take a few weeks.
Jones dismissed the Hawaii overtures at first, but he has since told Honolulu newspapers that he owes it to his family to listen.
But if the committee gets that far, to a Wednesday meeting with Jones, it will apparently be at the cost of losing McBride.
Meanwhile, McBride had an end-of-the-season meeting with Utah athletic director Chris Hill Monday and was to meet with him again Tuesday.
Hill says he told McBride, "I don't want him to go."
Hill hired McBride a decade ago and extended his contract a few years ago. McBride, 59, has three years left on the contract and is paid $220,000. Hawaii is believed to be offering about $250,000 and five years.
"We had a good meeting," Hill said Monday night. "I told him I really want him to stay and will continue to do what we can to help his program to be successful."
"He was positive. It went all right," said McBride, who spent the rest of the day Monday and part of Tuesday meeting with Ute players, discussing academic and off-season training goals.
Though McBride (62-43) has more wins than all but one coach in Ute history, has had only one losing season (1990) and has taken the Utes to four bowls and a top-10 national ranking (eighth/ninth, 1994), the last two seasons have been disappointing. The team beat itself several times with mental errors in '98. Its four losses came by a total of nine points and were all games the Utes could have won if it had made one less mistake.
McBride is frustrated.
Anonymous radio callers and Internet posters criticize McBride's regime, but Hill says he doesn't want to lose his coach and hopes that his support will keep McBride at Utah.
"I haven't made any particular decision one way or the other," said McBride Monday night.
Hawaii is the first job he's seriously pursued in his nine years as Ute coach, he says. Like Jones, he says he owed it to himself to investigate the situation because it is a place he'd like to live, and the rock-bottom Hawaii situation (15-game losing streak) would be the kind of challenge he'd love to remedy, like he did with Utah's.