UW president Mark Emmert's seen both ends of coaching results

The two Mark Emmerts roam freely in a single conversation. Half the time, he talks football like a hard-core fan, touching on special-teams play, spouting pertinent statistics, expressing the wanna-throw-something frustration of losing. The other half, Emmert sounds like a prototypical university president and almost seems exasperated as he details how much athletic performance can skew the perception of a school.

He's a man who, as the Louisiana State chancellor, once gave reporters the Tigers' injury report. And then he's a man who's quick to sigh and recite that athletics make up 2 percent of the university's budget, 2 percent of the student body and about 99 percent of the attention.

Even crazier, Emmert manages to corral the dueling ideas — and his dueling personas — and arrange them properly. He's able to sound like a football freak with perspective.

But there is one bit of duality about Emmert that needs clarity: Is he more the super-involved LSU chancellor who made a dramatic hire that transformed the Tigers? Or is he the more relaxed Washington president who approved Tyrone Willingham's hiring and watched the Huskies sink to this embarrassing low?

In the game of football fixes, Emmert has a 1-1 record. So, with the Huskies in the market for a Willingham replacement, this will be his tiebreaker. This will be the answer to an interesting query: Did Emmert get lucky hiring Nick Saban at LSU? Or does he have a magic touch that inexplicably failed him when he let former athletic director Todd Turner hire Willingham?

For certain, Emmert understands the importance of his next high-profile move. But he's more focused on restoring his alma mater's football prestige than his own rep.

He has heard the notion that this is no longer a premier job, that some think the Huskies will never return to their former level of dominance. He huffs and prepares to shock the critics.

"Despite the fact that we're having a tough go of it, this is a great opportunity for coaches," Emmert says. "We've been to the top. We've won national championships, played in Rose Bowls and been atop the Pac-10. We've got that greatness in our DNA."

He's absolutely right. The Huskies are, historically, one of college football's top 20 programs. Although the past five years have been rough, they haven't been gone long enough to lose their luster. Whenever a program knows success, it just needs the right leadership to recover.

It's on Emmert and new athletic director Scott Woodward to find that leader. Despite Emmert's bizarre search for an athletic director, despite the flop that became the Willingham hire, there's reason to believe Emmert can redeem himself.

"It's not going to be a decision by committee," Emmert said. "It's going to be Scott's and mine with input from appropriate people in the University of Washington family."

Since both men were at LSU during the Tigers' revival, they should be able to spot a superstar coach. They need to find their UW version of Saban, and such a choice may not be so obvious.

In fact, Saban wasn't considered a slam-dunk back then, either. Before Emmert brought him to LSU in 1999, Saban was a good coach who had yet to truly sparkle at Michigan State. He actually suffered blowout losses in three straight bowl games from 1995 to 1997, including a 28-point defeat to Washington in the 1997 Aloha Bowl and a 38-0 Sun Bowl setback to a Willingham-coached Stanford team.

But Emmert noticed the fire in Saban, the attention he paid to details and his relentless recruiting energy. Saban wound up turning around the Tigers in record time, culminating in a 2003 share of the national title.

Along the way, Emmert continued to contribute to Saban's success. He delivered on a promise to improve the stadium and football complex. He figured out how to provide new athletic dorms. When NFL teams first called, Emmert gave Saban raises to keep him around for as long as he could.

While the LSU chancellor, Emmert attended practices and was so omnipresent that Tigers beat writers jokingly called him Jerry Jones. But they respected his understanding of the game and what it took for LSU to compete at a national level.

I asked a colleague about Emmert. Wright Thompson, an ESPN.com reporter, once covered the Tigers for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Of Emmert, he said: "He's always the smartest person in the room."

So, what happened with the Willingham hire? Emmert doesn't shy from the decision. He backed it, it didn't work, and now he wants to fix it. He also says he doesn't regret giving Willingham the extra year that turned into a disaster.

"There was no reason to anticipate it being as unsuccessful as it has been," Emmert said.

The biggest Willingham detractors would surely argue that one. But when Emmert welcomed Willingham four years ago, within the first half-year of his UW presidency, he had no idea that he would follow up the Saban hire — the greatest home-run possible — with one that became perhaps the biggest miscall of the past decade in college football.

So, when it comes to making football decisions, who is Emmert, really?

We'll soon have a decisive answer.

Jerry Brewer: 206-464-2277 or jbrewer@seattletimes.com