Washington athletic director Todd Turner said throughout the Rick Neuheisel trial that he planned to stay as far away from the courtroom as he could. Having arrived at Washington a year after Neuheisel left, he wasn't involved in the trial.

Still, he had little choice but to watch the events with a bit of nervous anticipation. If Neuheisel had won at trial and received every dollar he was asking for, the school could have been forced to give him as much as $8 million, including the forgiveness of a $1.5 million loan he was given in 2002.

Instead, under terms of the settlement reached yesterday, the school will forgive the loan and give Neuheisel an additional $500,000.

"Obviously, I wanted it to be as low as it could possibly be," Turner said yesterday.

The money will come out of the athletic department's operating reserve fund, as would any other money the school would have been forced to pay Neuheisel.

The $1.5 million loan also had come out of the operating reserve fund, Turner said.

That fund once was estimated to contain as much as $20 million. But that was in the late 1990s before a bevy of capital projects, such as the renovation of Edmundson Pavilion, began to cut into it.

Turner said yesterday the fund is now somewhere between $7 million and $8 million, though he said it is always fluctuating as the Huskies make payments for capital projects.

Turner said the $500,000 payment "will have no immediate impact on our current operating budget."

Turner said the fund is about 20 percent of the school's roughly $40 million athletic budget, and he would like to see it higher than that. Still, he also said few athletic departments have reserve funds — most use every penny they bring in to pay expenses.

Washington's athletic department also is self-generating, meaning it spends only money it generates.

Turner said the money for Neuheisel would not come out of recent football ticket price hikes and increases in donations for football season tickets that have proven controversial.

Neuheisel, meanwhile, will get to keep a loan that he had sought in the summer of 2002 to pay off a mortgage on his Medina house.

Neuheisel purchased the house in 1999 for $4.2 million. He then used the loan — which he received in part after having had brief talks with Notre Dame about filling a vacancy that later was filled by current UW coach Tyrone Willingham — to pay off a $3.6 million mortgage in June 2002 that Neuheisel used to refinance the house.

Neuheisel sold the house in April 2004 for $6.2 million after the house had been on the market for seven months.

He then moved into a more modest house nearby, a home he figures to sell now that he is off to Baltimore to become quarterbacks coach for the Ravens.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com