…. But I wrote a hit piece on Bobby Hauck for the Las Vegas Sun. Sort of.

I was asked to write an essay on what UNLV fans can expect from Hauck, who I worked with, mostly on a friendly level but with some notable difficult points, for six seasons. Since you asked, I am to be paid $250 for it.

You might say what appeared in the Sun was pretty critical. You could say it was also heavily edited. For the sake of accuracy, I am including the final version of the essay I e-mailed to Las Vegas. It’s not all sweetness and nice, but contains nothing pulled from Jeff Pearlman’s column and well, read and compare.

MISSOULA, Mont. – Bobby Hauck is confident, smart, articulate, dedicated and possesses a charm that lends itself to being a top-notch recruiter.

That’s not the full measure of the man – he can also be stubborn, among other things – but in the business of winning football games you take the bad with the good.

There’s a lot more good than bad. Hauck’s student-athletes graduate and they play pretty good football, if 80 wins in 97 games in any indication. And he has been, when it’s all said and done, adaptable.

Hauck rather famously said he’d bring “an aerial circus,” to the Griz in 2003, after they had won the Division I Football Championship in ’01 with a balanced attack.

When Montana threw North Dakota State back into the game in Hauck’s second Saturday as a college coach – the Griz led 21-2 at halftime and lost 25-24 – he changed his approach.

Justin Green was the first of his bulldozing runners at UM, followed by Lex Hilliard and Chase Reynolds. Both Green and Hilliard moved onto the NFL, and Reynolds, a junior with 3,085 rushing yards to his credit, has a shot.

During that same 2003 season injuries shelved both starting quarterback Craig Ochs and his backup, Jeff Disney. Hauck closed practice for the week and came out with an option look against Idaho. The Griz won – and kept winning, with a balanced attack.

A year later I was in my first year covering the team, and the Griz made the FCS title game. It wasn’t all fun and games.

For example, during that 2004 season Hauck “fired” the team chaplain, Father Hogan, who’d been with the Griz since the 1990s. There was a conflict about when Hogan should hold Mass for the players; I’m not sure of the particulars now.

Hauck was upset because The Missoulian was doing a story on the dismissal of Hogan – a popular man in Missoula – and he felt it wasn’t worth the ink.

This wouldn’t be the last time our news judgment differed. My point was generally this: I didn’t meander through seven years of J-school so I could have a football coach decide what was news.

Yet here we were arguing the merits of the story, and it dawns on me: “Holy crap – it’s my second day on the job.”

We moved on from there, with a few bumps, including some awful off the field incidents. The 2007 season was rough, with the Jimmy Wilson murder case in California in June (he was acquitted two years later) and four players getting arrested for a home invasion that fall.

Hauck handled those his way, by which I mean with little or no comment. He handles discipline in-house. I may not agree with that approach, but I never imagined it mattered.

How he handles the media has been well-documented as well. His tiff with UM’s student newspaper is the most glaring example. I believe now he regrets snubbing The Kaimin; the boycott included his players, though he denied that was his call. It is sad that it was only after it went national that he ended it.

In his defense, I’ll say this: He is a disciplinarian, though fans may doubt this. His players will have a regimented lifestyle. They will go to winter conditioning, they will not skip treatment for injuries, they will go to class. They will behave and will graduate, or they can go someplace else.

I’ve seen enough log rolls and runs to the “M” above the campus to know this.

Hauck didn’t play football at UM, competing instead in track. His younger brother, Tim, walked on at UM after a year at an NAIA school and became an All-American safety for the Griz.

When Tim Hauck was a senior in 1989, Bobby Hauck was a graduate assistant with the Griz. Bobby had already caught the coaching bug by then, and since has been on staffs all over the western U.S. since. Northern Arizona. UCLA. Colorado. Washington.

Along the way he built a reputation as a recruiter and special teams coach. It was a surprise when he landed the job as a 38-year-old at Montana, but he made up for any perceived gaps on his resume by, and I quote, “Acing the interview.”

That’s from former Montana athletic director Wayne Hogan, who hired Hauck. What Hogan got was a raw head coach who surrounded himself with strong assistants, and who worked extremely hard and with complete confidence in his ability to get things done right.

Hauck isn’t so raw now, but everything else has stayed the same. That bodes well for UNLV.

*****

On the other hand, I probably buried the lead.

-Fritz Neighbor