Tuesday, May 20, 2003 | 11:16 a.m.
John Robinson has decided to resign his position as UNLV athletic director and was expected to announce his decision at a news conference today on campus. His decision came less than three months after suffering a heart attack.
School officials confirmed to the Sun that a news conference had been tentatively scheduled for 2 p.m. in the Si Redd Room at the Thomas & Mack Center.
Robinson, who will turn 68 in July, will remain as head football coach and will coach the Rebels for his fifth season this fall.
Robinson refused to comment when reached by the Sun at home this morning. So did senior associate athletic director Jerry Koloskie, who is the likely candidate to take over the athletic director duties, at least on an interim basis.
"I know there is a news conference planned for today out of (UNLV President) Dr. Carol Harter's office," Koloskie told the Sun. "We'll have to wait and see what happens."
Robinson replaced Charles Cavagnaro as UNLV's eighth athletic director on Jan. 1, 2002, after being unanimously approved for the position by the Nevada Board of Regents in August 2001. He has been the only head football coach/athletic director in the NCAA's 117-school Division I-A level at the time.
He inherited an athletic department that was in desperate need of outside fund-raising and quickly notched donations totaling $1.5 million in gifts to Rebels athletics, including $1 million from the family of the late Ernest Becker Sr. that went to installing two state-of-the-art artificial turf practice fields at Rebel Park. Another $500,000 from former UNLV football player and Palms casino co-owner George Maloof went to upgrading the strength and conditioning facility at the Lied Athletic Complex.
But the past 10 months have been a rocky time for Robinson.
First his Rebels football team, expected to contend for a bowl berth, underachieved for a second consecutive year, finishing with just a 5-7 record. However, UNLV closed the season with a stunning 36-33 upset of Mountain West Conference champion Colorado State in Fort Collins.
Then in late February, Robinson's wife, Linda, underwent major breast cancer surgery. It was while driving her home to Green Valley from the hospital in Orange, Calif., that Robinson began experiencing chest pains.
The following day, March 3, Robinson underwent surgery to remove a blockage in his right coronary artery. That kept Robinson out of his office for almost two weeks, but he was back on the sideline for the start of spring practice later that month. He has been routinely been putting in 8- to 10-hour days since then.
Robinson, who coached USC to a national championship in 1979 and helped tutor Heisman Trophy winners Charles White and Marcus Allen, has seen his time stretched even further in recent weeks by an ongoing university police investigation into the fraudulent use of a long-distance access PIN code that belonged to assistant Rebels head football coach and longtime friend John Jackson. It figures to get stretched even thinner in the coming weeks as the Mountain West Conference explores the possibility of expansion.
Linda Robinson also faces several more surgeries this year related to her breast cancer.
In the end, sources say those health and time issues led Robinson to decide to resign his athletic director duties.
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