You’ve been at TCU for more than 30 years, including four as an undergraduate. Can you remember an athletics season like the one TCU has just had?  Not even close. This year has easily been the most exciting from top to bottom. Football took another step by reaching the [Bowl Championship Series] after coming so close several times. Baseball has its highest ranking ever this year and should make a run at the College World Series, we hope. Women’s basketball made the NCAAs for the ninth time in 10 years. Both tennis teams won the conference tournament. Track’s done well. The golf teams have done well. Volleyball won 20-plus games again. It’s been fun, and it’s rewarding to hear other Mountain West Conference teams saying that to win the league, they have to beat TCU.

You work with coaches putting together the schedules for all the programs. For football, how did the upcoming Oregon State game at Cowboys Stadium come about? The popularity of these arranged games at a neutral site is growing, and ESPN’s usually leading the charge on them. They like our football program and are very well aware of the team’s success. So it’s not a surprise that it happened. ESPN approached [athletics director] Chris Del Conte about our interest in an intersectional game against a Pacific 10 Conference team at Cowboys Stadium, which also draws television interest. We worked with them on the finances and schedule and it turned into a win-win for everybody.

Texas Tech fell off the football schedule for this fall. What happened? A similar situation with Oregon State. ESPN approached Tech about moving a conference game with Texas to September and it conflicted with the scheduled date we had with them. The opportunity is certainly beneficial for them, but ESPN was talking to us, too, so I don’t know which happened first. But I can say that Tech is not off our schedule. They didn’t back out. We just rearranged the series. They’ll come here next season.

What’s the scheduling approach for other programs, like basketball and baseball?  Coach Schlossnagle and Coach Mittie, for example, talk a lot about challenging their teams. But they know what they have with their players and what they can handle. Coach Schlossnagle had the chance to back out of a game at Texas last year, but he didn’t. We had talked about that as a home and home, and the Longhorns couldn’t make it work to play in Fort Worth. Jim wanted to keep that game in Austin because he felt like his team needed to know how that stadium felt and how the turf played. Ultimately getting to Omaha may have to go through Austin. He was right, and he was glad he kept that game.

How difficult is it to get BCS conference teams to come here for football games? We had a series with a Big 10 school that was looking very strong a few years ago. Then their conference schedule came out and they were set to play their conference rival the following week. The coach called and said he knew what Fort Worth in September was going to be like, with the heat, and he understood the brand of physical football Gary Patterson’s teams play. He said that’s not the kind of game we need to play before we play our rival. He wanted all the bullets in his arsenal and just felt like he couldn’t take the game against us. It’s a compliment.

Compliment yes, but frustrating, right? There are all kind of factors that go into it. How a team recruits an area, available dates, who is the opponent prior to the game or after are all considered. For us, too. Gary Patterson keeps those things in mind and he knows what he thinks is going to be best for his team. One thing that’s becoming more common, however, is that schools are acknowledging that a loss to TCU is a “good loss.” It’s not a mark against them.

What will getting to play a game at Cowboys Stadium mean for TCU? It’s an exciting opportunity to play at a venue that will be a lot of fun for our fans and alumni. It’s certainly going to be a highlight for the young men on that team. For that time of year, networks are looking for marquee games, and it’s a compliment to us to be in one of them. It confirms that we have major appeal, and it will garner us national attention. That’s why we agree to play those games.

Would we ever consider moving a home game there?  It would take a lot of discussion for that. It would have to be a very unique opportunity to do that. I don’t think we renovate our stadium and then get in the practice of moving big games to another venue. So I think that would be very unlikely.

How will the renovation of Amon Carter Stadium affect TCU Athletics? I think two or three ways. I think it will help show off our most prominent program. It will have the amenities and style that is consistent with the caliber of our football program. Financially, it will give us opportunities for additional revenue with suites and club seats. And it’s a campus landmark, and we have the responsibility to maintain it in a manner that it deserves.[Associate Athletics Director for Operations] Ross Bailey and I call her the grand old lady. So many alums have watched or played in games there over the decades. It exudes a quiet elegance and that reflects back on the department and on the university as a whole. So it’s a very important project.

Conference realignment is in the news and speculation is rampant. Having worked through the breakup of the Southwest Conference [in 1994] and the last decade and a half of going from the Western Athletic Conference to Conference USA to the Mountain West, what is TCU’s mind-set as it unfolded? Well, it goes back to the mid-1990s. We’ve been at the forefront of changes since then. I think the overarching attitude is that TCU has gotten to a point where we’re competitive with anyone in the nation and we’ve made investment in our programs and facilities so that we could be in the best position possible when the next wave of changes come. I think the goal is to have a conference looking to expand to look at TCU and say that we’re a very attractive option.

What might be used against us as a negative?  Our academic model and culture maybe. In the old Southwest Conference, votes on academic issues often split along the lines of the four privates against the five publics. It’s a difference of opinion. Small private school versus large land-grant school. As a small private university, we have a smaller alumni base, but I think if you look at the big games we’ve been in the last five or six years, TCU has shown up and Fort Worth is showing up.

In what conference would you like to see TCU when all the movement stops? Well, you know I grew up with TCU in the Southwest Conference and I enjoyed all those rivalries and the personalities and history. So I have a faint hope that the Texas schools could all be back in the same league together at some point. I think it would be interesting to see those rivalries renewed again, especially with the success we’ve had now. I don’t know that all the schools with make it back together again, but I have a feeling that eventually we will be grouped with the teams around us from the Big 12 in some kind of conference.

Boise State has now joined the Mountain West and Utah has departed for the Pac-10. How do you assess those changes for our conference? Boise State is a great program that’s known nationally in football. We certainly are familiar with them. I believe we owe them one. All of our games with them have been on national television and have been exciting games. Now, it just seems like future games with them will possibly have the conference championship on the line. Utah’s departure is tough in that we lose a team that had become a good rival to us. I think they brought out the best in us, and we brought out the best in them. I think the league as a whole will continue to do what its always done: be highly competitive and its best teams will be highly ranked and are BCS-quality teams.

Do you have a favorite moment or memory of your years here at TCU?
Wow. There is quite a few. You I started here as an employee in my 20s, not far removed from the students I was monitoring [as academic advisor]. I think the 1985-86-87 classes helped establish me. They gave me feedback. They gave me self-assurance. The ’86 class with the perfect graduation rate was certainly a career highlight for me. And I have maintained those relationships over the years. They’ve been very supportive of me, especially during the loss of my daughter Molly [in 2005]. I really get a joy out of seeing what they’ve become. Sometimes it hits me, these are 45-year-old men and women now. Part of me still sees them as TCU student-athletes from decades ago. That relationship will always be there.

They created a scholarship in Molly’s name. Yes they did. They’re a pretty neat group of people. Chuck Mooney. David Rascoe. Roosevelt Collins. And many more. There’s a bond still there, a real feeling of community. I don’t think we had to cook a meal for two months after she died. The teams were great too. I remember the men’s basketball team during the [National Invitational Tournament] wearing the MH patches on their jerseys. They were playing against Western Michigan on the road and it was late, late in the game and we were down. We got a steal and [Corey] Santee hits that three. I remember Marcus Sloan saying, “Mr. H,” and he tapped that patch and said, “They didn’t have a chance.” Women’s golf wore pink ribbons and women’s basketball wore the patches and baseball wrote MH in paint pen on their caps. I will always remember and treasure that.