But will Holmoe get to do it his way?

PROVO — Tom Holmoe was introduced as BYU's new athletic director, Tuesday, with the explanation that the search was done in "the BYU way."

Which is to say they took their sweet time. Six months, to be exact. It's true Stonehenge took 1,200 years to build, and it worked out nicely. Still, you had to wonder: What was the holdup? Were they waiting for someone to get a passport? Holmoe was just down the hall. If they'd wanted, they could have interviewed and hired him over lunch. Instead they considered 45 applications, interviewing 14.

You can't say they grabbed the first guy available.

In another sense, they did.

Whatever the case, when the suspense was over it didn't take long for Holmoe to get his marching orders. At the press conference, vice president Fred Skousen said, "We want to win and we want to win big."

Which, he explained, means they want to be contenders in the Mountain West Conference in football and basketball, which in turn should land them in bowl games and the NCAA Tournament. They also want to continue their national presence in non-revenue sports such as volleyball and track.

They intend to get back to being BYU, which for most of a quarter century was the dominant athletic program in the conference. But that was before 2002, the year the football program went bonk! And before this year, when the basketball team went splat!

It was before people started being churned over in the athletic department and fans started staying away and boosters started complaining and the profit margin shrank.

Before selling the program got a lot harder.

"My dream right now," said Holmoe, addressing disenchanted BYU fans, "is to be able to earn the respect of those fans."

For those waiting for a dramatic departure from BYU protocol, though, this wasn't it. Holmoe played at BYU, is LDS and has spent the past three years in the athletic department at the school. Since Val Hale was fired last fall, Holmoe was part of a four-part administration that also included co-workers Brian Santiago, Peter Pilling and Janie Penfield. When all the interviews were done, it came down to Pilling and Holmoe.