Dave Reardon: Matlin exits and Angelos enters as Hawaii AD

David Matlin started as University of Hawaii athletic director in 2015. On his last day at the job Friday, he said the over-under eight years ago for how long he’d last was 18 months.

“And I told them to take the under,” Matlin said, without even the trace of a grin.

And, if we recall accurately, there wasn’t a lot to smile about with what he inherited. Football was losing — games and fans, with little hope of quick recovery, and men’s basketball was dealing with an NCAA investigation.

He knew what a grind the job is even when things are going well — the impossibility of keeping more than a million stakeholders happy (not even counting the fans who don’t live in Hawaii), how there is never really a day off as every one of them comes with hundreds of emails and text messages.

His job was to somehow wade through all that, and maintain a primary focus on student-athlete welfare.

“I wanted to serve at least the five years (of his first contract),” Matlin said. “My dad (baseball executive Lew Matlin) always said to honor your commitments.”

But, he also considered it a great privilege.

“What I owe the University of Hawaii is immeasurable,” Matlin said. “This place gave me incredible blessings, education. I learned humility, which I needed. Without the relationships, I wouldn’t have made it six months. The people I’ve met, it’s all about the relationships.”

Matlin, 58, said he has “no idea” what he will do next, other than go on a family trip and to a class reunion, while mixing in some stand-up paddleboarding, hiking and recreational reading.

He said he is retiring with his health intact, but added that keeping it that way is part of why he decided in January that he would leave the job.

“I’m fine,” said Matlin, a husband, and a father of two adult children. “But I need to focus on that.”

Then he held up his cellphone.

“One thing I’m going to work on is not having this with me 24-7,” he said.

Like Matlin eight years ago, Craig Angelos doesn’t get to ease his way in now.

Before he can start moving cartons around in his home and settling into what is his office, he has some heavy lifting of a different kind his first two days on the job Monday and Tuesday.

Maybe meeting with new colleagues isn’t your idea of intensive labor. But this is important stuff — so important that the Mountain West Conference calls it a board of directors meeting.

These gatherings are always especially huge for Hawaii, which plays football in the Mountain West and its other sports in the Big West. Because of our unique geography, there are always special rules for UH, and its status always seems tenuous.

They hold these meetings every summer. It just so happens that this year it’s here, and it coincides with the switchover from Matlin to Angelos.

“We’ve been talking a lot, most recently Sunday for a few hours,” Matlin said on Friday. “I want to be an appropriate resource for him. I want to support him.”

You can bet some of that conversation involved UH’s position in the Mountain West, and how it must pay travel expenses to MWC teams that play here.

And you know the conference’s ADs will look closely at how construction is going at the Ching Complex, UH’s temporary football home the past two seasons and for the foreseeable future. It is “on schedule,” Matlin said, to go from 9,000 to 15,000 seats in time for the first kickoff this fall.

Regardless, the overall football facility situation (no new Aloha Stadium until 2028?) is an early test of Angelos’ ability to put lipstick on a real oinker. Can he and other UH leaders convince the rest of the Mountain West to remain patient with UH’s plight?

A lot has been said about Angelos, 61, not having worked at any universities west of Indiana in his 30-year intercollegiate athletic administration career.

But, while he might be meeting some of his fellow Mountain West ADs for the first time this week, it’s not like he’s unfamiliar with most of the schools or the region and will be out of his comfort zone.

When Angelos worked at the NCAA from 1991 to 1994, one of his jobs was liaison to the Western Athletic Conference — which eight schools infamously broke away from to form the Mountain West in 1999.

Hawaii was not invited to join them then. Six of the original eight WAC defectors are still in the Mountain (interestingly, the two that don’t remain, BYU and Utah, are Angelos’ alma mater and his hometown college, since he was the 1979 state football player of the year at Salt Lake City’s powerhouse Skyline High).

“I thought a lot about college football,” said Angelos, who played baseball at BYU and professionally in Italy instead.

He also got a law degree at Creighton and worked at law firms in Omaha and Los Angeles.

“The truth is, this guy’s got a lot of experience,” Matlin said of Angelos. “He’s excited to be here, and that’s so important.”

Angelos would be excited to be the AD anywhere, considering how many jobs he’s applied for and not gotten over the past decade, how many times he’s been passed over or discarded when a new university president took over, like what happened at Florida Atlantic.

FAU, where a football program — and a stadium — were built nearly from scratch on his watch, was his only job where he was the athletic director. He was No. 2 in the department everywhere else.

It would have been easy for him to give up many times in the past 10 years and go do something else.

He said he is coming to Hawaii with his eyes open, knowing he has a lot to learn. He knows it’s a challenge, that there is no pro or other Division I college sports program within 2,500 miles. But he sees it as an opportunity if everyone rows in the same direction

“Certainly there’s a lot of political factors, but I hope we can all be aligned in our goal and our mission, from the governor’s office to the legislature to local government to the university,” Angelos said. “That’s when really things happen. If there’s bickering it can lead to gridlock. My big thing will be to try to bring that alignment together where we can accomplish great things.”