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In early February, UNO Athletic Director Trev Alberts watched the Maverick football team sign a 20-member recruiting class. Around the same time, he also signed off on the hiring of a new assistant football coach.

At the time, Alberts acknowledges, he knew there was a strong possibility the University of Nebraska at Omaha would not be fielding a football team this fall.

UNO was in serious discussions with the Division I Summit League about membership, and one athletic department document suggests Alberts had what he considered an informal invitation from the league as early as Jan. 25. And if the bid became official, Alberts knew he would be recommending the school drop both football and wrestling.

Alberts says watching the football team move ahead with those life-altering decisions was “absolutely” troubling to him.

But he and UNO Chancellor John Christensen stand by Alberts' decision not to intervene, saying the Maverick athletic boss was stuck on the horns of a dilemma.

Losing the Summit bid would have left UNO little choice but to stay in NCAA Division II. And football is a sport UNO is required to have to be a member of its current Division II conference.

It was a risk, they say, they couldn't take.

“The only thing more difficult than the timeline we were dealt here — and potentially more embarrassing — would have been to proceed as if we were going Division I, only not to get an invitation and be left without a football team,'' Alberts said last week. “The alternative just wasn't feasible.''

Nine weeks after UNO announced its plans, and seven weeks after the NU Board of Regents voted its approval, questions linger about the school's decision to step up to the highest level of NCAA competition while dropping its football and wrestling programs.

A story in The World-Herald last week brought attention to a $1.4 million NCAA application fee that wasn't widely known in the days leading up to the regents' vote.

ESPN the same day presented its take on the UNO controversy in a piece called “Wrestling with the truth in Nebraska,'' raising a couple of new issues and again giving voice to critics.

Alberts and Christensen continue to be barraged with questions and accusations, most from wrestling advocates locally and nationally who are upset by the loss of UNO's eight-time national champion program.

The campus leaders acknowledge some of the questions still raised are legitimate — the timing, the openness of the process and the broader impacts on campus. In some cases, the final answers won't be known until far down the road in UNO's Division I venture.

But Christensen and Alberts also are frustrated that most questions were answered long ago, while others are based in conspiracy theories that are almost impossible to lay to rest.

The reasons behind the move, the campus leaders said, haven't changed.

UNO's Division II athletic department was simply failing financially, the school was unable to generate significant revenues outside of hockey, its lone Division I sport.

To cover operating deficits, university tuition, tax and student fee dollars injected into athletics increased from $1.9 million to $5.9 million in less than a decade. With the campus facing nearly $4 million in budget cuts in the next two years, Christensen said he was not willing to spend more.

In dropping the pricey football program, chasing new revenue opportunities available only in Division I and focusing on building upon its avid hockey following, Alberts and Christensen see hope for finally bringing stability to the department.

“Everyone continues to want to find a smoking gun,'' Christensen said. “There is no smoking gun.''

* * *

Using information from documents obtained in a public records request, and after hours of interviews last week with Christensen, Alberts and others, The World-Herald looks at some of the questions that have refused to go away.

When did it become apparent that UNO would drop football and wrestling? Why couldn't there have been more warning?

Those questions are particularly relevant to the families of the football recruits who signed letters of intent with UNO Feb. 2, many turning down other offers.

“Everybody knew before those letters of intent were signed that football was going to be dropped,” said Jason Bartling of Omaha, a former Maverick football player. “That's the thing that's just sickening to me.”

Alberts has given Feb. 18 — more than two weeks after signing day — as the critical date in UNO's move to Division I. That's when he says Summit League Commissioner Tom Douple told him the conference wanted to sponsor UNO's reclassification to Division I.

But a document recently released to The World-Herald raises new questions about that timeline, suggesting the school had an informal invitation to join the league at least 3½ weeks before that.

In a document prepared for a Jan. 25 meeting, Alberts indicated UNO “has an informal outstanding invitation” to join the Summit League. And if the bid were to become reality, UNO would “end football and wrestling.”

Alberts said last week there was no discrepancy between the document and the timeline he previously offered.

The Jan. 25 document referred to conversations he had with Douple in preceding weeks in which the commissioner indicated UNO was a strong contender for a league spot, Alberts said. While at the time he termed it an informal invitation, he said he now sees it amounted to less than that.

“I suppose semantics are part of it, but we didn't have a verbal guarantee until the 18th of February,” he said.

Douple agreed that Feb. 18 was the critical date during the three-month courtship between UNO and the league. That's when he told Alberts he was prepared to take UNO's bid before the league's presidents for approval.

“Was there encouragement from the league office (before Feb. 18) about their possibility of getting in? Absolutely,” Douple said. “Could I guarantee they were getting in? Absolutely not.”

Christensen said even the Feb. 18 word from Douple “meant nothing to me.”

He and Alberts said their experience with UNO's move to a new hockey league two years ago — at one point an agreement was pulled back for more negotiation — showed nothing is official until the papers are signed. In the case of the Summit, that didn't happen until two days before UNO announced the plan March 13.

Douple defended Alberts' decision to remain mum, saying the Summit presidents once decided to wait a year on a potential membership.

As far back as December, Alberts acknowledges, he was relatively certain UNO would drop football if it went to Division I. The decision to also drop wrestling came some weeks later, after he was looking at how UNO fit its potential new league.

Alberts sees no way he could have let either Maverick team know the school was even considering terminations.

The football team would have started losing players and coaches and had trouble regrouping if no Summit bid came, he said. It also would have been a major distraction to the wrestling team in its bid for a third straight Division II title.

Of course, the way the wrestling team ultimately learned of its fate — in a phone call from Alberts just hours after winning the title — also has drawn major criticism. Alberts now acknowledges that was a mistake.

But given the painful nature of the changes, he said, there was no good time for them.

* * *

Why were emails related to UNO's move to Division I deleted?

Public records requests by The World-Herald and ESPN produced few emails from Christensen or Alberts related to the Division I move, all falling in the days just before and after the regents' vote.

Alberts and Christensen both deny any effort to purge emails or cover up anything, saying older emails were deleted in the normal course of business. University lawyers also say there was no blanket requirement to keep emails.

Christensen said a member of the technology department regularly cleans out his old emails. Five people regularly read his messages, he said, so he has nothing to hide.

Alberts said his practice is to delete emails as soon as he has acted on them. “I have 11 emails right now,” he said of his inbox at one point last week.

Once emails are deleted from the campuswide computer system, they remain on the server for about a week before they are permanently deleted.

Joel Pedersen, the University of Nebraska's legal counsel, said the university policy is consistent with state law. Users have discretion to determine whether a communication is important enough to be preserved.

The Nebraska Secretary of State in 2003 updated state record retention policy, saying important electronic communications are subject to the same retention requirements as paper records. But the policy was not mandated because of cost concerns.

Even if lawful, UNO's failure to produce any emails from the key decision-making period will continue to fuel speculation there's more to the story.

* * *

In its financial analysis of the costs of football and wrestling, did UNO properly account for the tuition revenue paid by non-scholarship athletes?

An economist engaged by ESPN faulted the university's figures indicating the football team lost $1.3 million last year. He said the school failed to take into account the tuition paid by non-scholarship players.

In all, UNO splits 36 scholarships among some 120 football players. The tuition paid by those players amounted to some $700,000, the economist said, offsetting a big part of football's cost.

UNO officials said the way they accounted for the tuition funds is standard, not only in athletics nationally but throughout the university. The chemistry department is not credited with the tuition revenue from chemistry majors. The dollars go into the overall university budget. Athletes' tuition dollars are no different.

And by putting $1.3 million into football, UNO officials said they are arguably crediting the program for the $700,000, and more. The $1.3 million also doesn't include thousands spent on football facilities, utilities and maintenance, costs that also are accounted for universitywide.

The tuition dollars would be less of a financial consideration if UNO attempted to take football to Division I. The school would foot the bill for 27 additional scholarships and have at least that many fewer players paying their own way. Roster limits, typical at many Division I schools, could cut tuition income even more.

Still, the issue can't be completely dismissed. It appears the university budget will take a hit this fall from reduced athletic tuition dollars.

Christensen said it's a manageable cost he's willing to bear to finally bring stability to the department long term.

* * *

Did Alberts' chilly relationship with coach Mike Denney play a role in wrestling's demise?

Alberts has asserted he dropped wrestling to better align UNO's sports offerings with those of the Summit League, replacing the championship squad with men's golf and soccer.

But Denney's many vocal supporters have charged that the move was personal, based in Alberts' distaste for wrestling and conflicts with Denney.

Denney, who spent more than 30 years at UNO, has not spoken in detail on the subject, only telling The World-Herald previously that he had little relationship with Alberts. The coach, who has signed a severance and is moving his program en masse to Maryville University in Missouri, did not return a call seeking comment last week.

But Alberts' critics often cite two particular slights they say showed his attitude toward Denney: Alberts' failure to congratulate the coach for winning the 2010 national championship; and the department decision to pull the plug on a press conference Denney planned with a former Maverick wrestler now gunning for the Olympics.

Alberts declined in an interview to address the two alleged snubs. He would speak only in general on the two men's disagreement over whether UNO should consider Division I — Denney was strongly opposed — and friction over Alberts' efforts to assert leadership upon arriving two years ago.

“I walked in, and I had 16 individual athletic departments,” Alberts said. “Each coach ran their own.”

Despite their differences, he said, the decision to drop wrestling was no vendetta.

Without change in its sports lineup, UNO would bring only three men's programs into the new conference, half as many as the next lowest school. Douple questioned whether there's a Division I school in the country that competes in only three men's sports within its league.

And regardless of the Denney-Alberts relationship, wrestling's fate ultimately rested with perhaps the campus' biggest grappling fan. Christensen, a former college wrestler, was a personal friend of Denney's and a regular at UNO meets.

Christensen said he simply felt he had to drop the beloved program as part of the broader plan to end the “fiscal nightmare” in athletics. “To me, it was always about the budget.”

* * *

Did UNO try to play down the $1.4 million Division I application fee?

Alberts said there was no effort to hide the fee. He noted it was part of the public presentation he delivered to the regents March 25, just before the board vote to OK the move.

However, the fee was not widely known or discussed during the two weeks preceding the regents' vote. Two regents last week initially said they didn't remember hearing of the fee until UNO officials reminded them of the presentation.

Alberts said the fee, while steep, was included in the calculations indicating Division I athletics could work financially for UNO.

* * *

Did political concern that Division I football at UNO would harm the Huskers kill the Maverick program?

That issue was first publicly raised by UNO football booster David Sokol in an interview with The World-Herald the day after the school's announcement.

He recalled a conversation he had with Alberts last year in which the athletic director said Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne opposed UNO stepping up to play in lower Division I, or the Football Championship Subdivision formerly known as Division I-AA.

Osborne and Alberts both denied such a conversation. Osborne allowed he wouldn't have been thrilled, but said he didn't oppose it, either, saying Alberts needed to do what was best for UNO.

Some have seized on Osborne's later announcement that Nebraska would not field a team in the new Big Ten hockey league as a sign of a quid pro quo protecting the schools' primary sports.

Alberts, often speculated as a possible successor to Osborne in Lincoln and one of the most decorated defensive players in Husker history, denies any political dealing, saying the football decision was strictly financial. UNO's analysis found Summit schools playing football had far larger athletic budgets, requiring additional university dollars.

A World-Herald analysis in March that, unlike UNO's, looked specifically at the costs of the FCS found that UNO would have to almost double its football budget to reach the average of schools in the league it would have joined, and grow the budget almost 50 percent just to match the lowest spender.

The analysis also found that guarantee checks for playing big-time schools fell far short of covering the cost difference, at under $300,000 for the typical school.

Nebraska football likely played a significant role in UNO football's demise, though not in the direct manner some suggest. UNO always struggled to make a mark in the shadow of the Huskers.

Former UNO Athletic Director Don Leahy recalled a game in the 1970s when a UNO opponent scored and Maverick fans cheered. They were listening to the radio, reacting to a Husker touchdown.

Leahy, who has served as an adviser to Alberts, said it's even tougher now that all Nebraska games are on TV. Even championship Maverick teams have struggled to draw. Last fall, UNO home games averaged 3,800 fans.

“Football has been my life,” Leahy said. “But what a battle to get credibility when you're competing with the Cornhuskers.”

* * *

Why was the process so secretive? Shouldn't the campus have been more involved in such an important decision?

Campus involvement in drafting the plan was limited.

The plan was drawn primarily by Alberts and four administrators on his staff, using as a sounding board a group of Omaha business leaders studying broader UNO campus needs.

The plan was then endorsed by Christensen, who did not widely share it with other campus leaders until days before it was announced. No campus forum was held before the regents vote.

While UNO's closely held process is not unusual when schools drop sports, some schools have engaged their communities.

For example, two campus subcommittees at the University of California-Berkeley studied athletic financial problems before the school announced earlier this year it was dropping five sports. Afterward, supporters of the sports were able to rally private financial support to save four of them.

UNO professor David Corbin said the school's process violated principles of shared governance. And it prevented a discussion of broader implications, such as the loss of opportunities of students studying athletic training to work with the UNO football team.

“It certainly appears a very small group made this decision without proper consultation,” he said.

Boosters were also on the outside. Bartling, the former UNO football player, said the secretive process and 12-day window for public comment before the regents' vote left little ability to come up with alternative solutions.

Alberts and Christensen say engaging more people would have risked damaging leaks and campus conflict. They say the numbers would have led to the same conclusions. Privately endowing the sports, they say, was a false hope, requiring upward of $20 million.

Not all on campus were upset. In the UNO faculty senate, there was no sentiment either way. The body's executive committee ultimately endorsed the changes.

At this point, UNO can't redo the process. Still, the path taken means the questions for some may never be put to rest.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1130, henry.cordes@owh.com

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