Kaverman's fate in hands of Edgar, Samuel

Remember when the mishandling of Quin Snyder's firing was about to turn into the final straw for Mike Alden?

Doesn't seem like it was very long ago, does it?

Thanks to Gary Pinkel's 5-1 football team and the promise of a better basketball season ahead, Alden seems to have escaped the hot seat -- for now.

The hot seat is warming for Don Kaverman.

The Southeast Missouri State athletic director is having a rough fall.

The football team is 2-4, 0-3 in the Ohio Valley Conference and 1-3 against teams in its own classification (Division I-AA). The Redhawks last week lost their top player, running back Timmy Holloman.

The university announced last week that Holloman had become ineligible under NCAA rules and would be out indefinitely.

Strike two came later in the week when senior basketball player Brandon Foust, who recently was picked for the OVC's preseason all-conference team, was banned from campus. Foust, who was involved in an altercation Oct. 5, was allowed back on campus after a ruling Wednesday in a university judicial affairs hearing, though he still may face charges from the Cape Girardeau city attorney's office.

The two incidents don't reflect very well on Southeast's two high-profile programs. And they may have ramifications on the all-important bottom line: wins and losses.

But they surely aren't enough to call for a new athletic director yet.

Those who want to link these incidents to Kaverman's control of the athletic department have ammunition because the school's two high-profile programs are in the midst of losing stretches.

The football team is two losses away from its fifth consecutive losing season.

The men's basketball team has had five losing seasons in the last six years.

Even the school's most successful high-profile program, the women's basketball team that made the NCAA tournament the last two years, has a cloud. It is awaiting the final word from the NCAA on an investigation that has lingered for 21 months.

Some time soon, possibly this month, Southeast could find out if it has to forfeit some victories or even the 2005-06 Ohio Valley Conference championship.

It has been reported before in the Southeast Missourian that institutional control was an issue during the final stages of the investigation. How much of a chance did Kaverman have to intervene or oversee the program before the NCAA probe began in February 2006?

There were warning signs from an internal probe in 2003. And one has to wonder what the NCAA makes of a memo from the compliance officer to Kaverman saying that internal investigation was possibly undermined by a coverup. The AD's response was asking the compliance officer to investigate further, certainly an interesting challenge for someone believing they were told lies the first time around.

And there's the issue of funding for Southeast Missouri State athletics.

Supporters of the football and basketball programs have grumbled about the university's funding -- or lack thereof -- when it comes to the major sports.

Kaverman points out that Southeast funds men's and women's programs more equitably than most schools, and he also has worked within the dollar figures doled out to him by the university president.

The university in 2005-06 had a $7.3 million budget, which was a half-million more than the previous year and $1.2 million more than was spent in 2002-03, according to federal data.

That rate of growth for expenses is comparable with our friends at Southern Illinois, although SIU had revenues of more than $11 million in 2005-06 while spending $9.7 million.

Part of an AD's job in this day and age is to be the rainmaker, shaking money out of alums and supporters who want to see the improved facilities and frills that lure the best student-athletes to programs. Convincing supporters to contribute to a winning cause is the best way to grow programs when the school president isn't willing to hand over a larger portion of the university budget. But that means you have to be able to show them some high-profile wins and occasional conference championships.

The inability to land a large donation or to control the NCAA violations of a program may be larger problems than baby-sitting individual members of the football and basketball teams, but even they likely won't be the determing factors in Kaverman's future.

Ask the women's basketball supporters if they would prefer the two OVC championship banners and NCAA appearances with a few infractions or a program that did no wrong and didn't win. In the last two years, Southeast played Stanford and battled Oklahoma ... on national TV. How cool is that?

Winning can trump a lot of problems.

More than the NCAA or Brandon Foust, those holding Don Kaverman's fate in their hands are his high-profile hires, football coach Tony Samuel and men's basketball coach Scott Edgar. He had inherited Gary Garner as the basketball coach and hired Tim Billings, who had the program's second winning record in the Division I-AA level in the last 16 years. Samuel and Edgar, two hires greeted with acclaim, are his guys.

Kaverman's contract runs through June 2009.

By then, Samuel will have had three full years to revive the football program. And Edgar will have had three years to try to get Southeast back on top of the OVC, where it was in 1999-2000, or at least back to the league's final four in Nashville.

Positive scholar-athlete recognition and championships in track and women's soccer are nice feathers in Kaverman's cap, but they are easily offset when an athlete misbehaves or a program steps afoul of NCAA rules.

Whether his chair is still a hot seat in the spring of 2009 will depend if the major programs are winning.

Toby Carrig is the editor of Semoball.com.