No letting up as Moos eyes UO's future.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

Bill Moos will be wearing green tonight, but not the green of the University of Oregon.

On Friday nights, it's Sheldon High School green, as the Oregon athletic director follows his son, Bo, a two-way lineman for the Irish football team, which hosts South Medford.

In past years, this is a game Bill Moos would have missed; he'd have been on the charter flight with the Oregon football team, en route to California. But this year, for Bo's senior year, Moos has arranged to fly commercially to Oregon road games on Saturday mornings, even if the challenge in two weeks - getting from Medford on Friday night to Pullman on Saturday - is daunting.

"In this business, you miss a lot of birthdays, and some anniversaries, and a lot of your children's activities," Moos said. "I didn't want to miss his senior year."

The business is all-encompassing. As much as he enjoys spending Friday evenings amid the comparative innocence of prep football, there's really never a minute when Moos isn't the Oregon AD, and even in private moments he finds himself thinking about how to solve the next problem, and the problems have been there.

He's begun his 12th year at Oregon, in a profession in which the average stint is five years, and the past few have been tough.

In February 2004, the UO administration shelved the project to replace McArthur Court; building a new basketball arena had become Moos' top priority. That summer, the UO football program was placed on two years' probation for a major recruiting violation.

Last year brought the unpleasant end to the Oregon tenure of track and field coach Martin Smith, and subsequent public criticism of Moos by Oregon's biggest donor, Nike co-founder Phil Knight - the major potential donor to a revived arena project that's still in limbo.

This year, Moos made a controversial decision to retain men's basketball coach Ernie Kent, and Knight expressed more concerns after associate AD Jim Bartko, who'd become a personal friend of Knight and his family, left for Cal.

Certainly, it's a coincidence that all of that happened after Moos, with the best of intentions, admitted in January 2004 that he might be interested in the AD job at Washington, in the state in which he was born and grew up and graduated from college at Washington State.

Even though the reasons had much to do with eventually going home in retirement, to the family wheat farm in eastern Washington, his statement clearly angered Oregon fans, including Knight, who were offended that Moos would even consider jumping to the Huskies, given the history of that rivalry and given that Moos himself had, as he puts it, preached that "we weren't going to chase Washington, that we were going to set the bar."

"And it should have (made fans angry)," Moos admitted. "My interest, whatever level I had, was primarily a personal one, having to do with life after being an AD. I feel good that I was honest, and yet I know that raised some eyebrows and that I probably lost some friends along the way.

"But at the end of the day, I'm still at Oregon because I want to be."

In fact, he said, since he was 14, when his family moved from the wheat farm to Olympia, he's never lived longer in one place than Eugene. Bo will be the third child of Bill and Kendra Moos to graduate from a Eugene high school; their daughter Christa was married here; their youngest son was born here. This is home, too.

Moos turns 56 in January; with an 8-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter at home, he figures to work somewhere into his 60s. Whether he'll be an AD for the rest of his working life remains to be seen, but he said he doesn't want to be an AD anywhere else, and could see himself here four more years, at least.

"There are still things to be accomplished, but having said that, when they get accomplished there are going to be other things," he said. "There's always going to be a way to make us better, and as soon as we neglect that, then we're resting on our laurels."

Thing of it is, if he so chose, Moos could rest on his laurels and they'd put him at the top of the list of Oregon's all-time athletic directors, encompassing the construction of the Moshofsky Center, and the magnificent expansion of Autzen Stadium, and the internal improvements to the Casanova Center, including the attention-getting football locker room.

And it's been a golden era for Oregon football; with bowl appearances, sellout crowds, cutting-edge marketing and uniforms, the Ducks have developed a national identity in the Moos era. While Moos didn't hire coach Mike Bellotti, he's given him the kind of support that's enabled Oregon to win Pac-10 titles, and while Bellotti also has looked at other jobs, he, too, is still at Oregon because he wants to be.

Even the biggest setback of the Moos era, the lack of groundbreaking for a new basketball arena, is wrapped up in a positive. You'll remember that former basketball coach Jerry Green alienated many fans for having the temerity to suggest that Oregon needed to replace Mac Court; Moos has at least forged a consensus that it must happen.

And even the most personally troubling ordeal for Moos, the demise of the Martin Smith coaching regime - because Moos had hired Smith, and Smith had done what he'd asked, restored discipline to Oregon track and field, made the men's program competitive again - became one of his greatest triumphs, because Moos hired Vin Lananna, who's bringing the community back to track and field, and the Olympic Trials to the community.

Will Moos land on his feet with his decision to retain Kent? Arguably, Moos could have enhanced his own popularity if he'd fired Kent after last season.

"I like to make decisions for the right reasons, and I felt the best decision last spring with Ernie was to retain him," Moos said. "If I had the same choice to make right now, even after some of the reactions to that, I'd have made the same decision."

If some fans and donors are indeed upset with Moos, he's making himself a more visible target this fall, if you want to look at it that way. He's making a point of getting out more than he has in a few years. He attends the Oregon Club meetings in Portland each Thursday, and spends the day there, keeping appointments with boosters; he was in Bend a couple of weeks ago, and will spend a day with Medford constituents before Bo's game against North Medford there in two weeks.

In recent years, Moos said, "we had so many things happening that I thought I had to be involved with internally that I started to lose focus a little bit. ... It took me out of the day-to-day personal touches not only with my staff, but the thousands of people who support us. I'm doing more of that again and loving it. When we were building this thing, that's what it was all about."

And, yes, Moos and Knight visit with each other at Oregon football games, and outwardly, at least, things seem cordial enough. "If there's an issue there," Moos said, "it isn't mine."

It's not likely that that issue, and others, are ever far from Moos' thoughts, but Bo's football games, and the pizza parties with Sheldon parents and players, offer a respite, as do the other family activities in which Moos partakes with his younger kids. At 6-feet-2, 265 pounds, Bo's getting recruited - Idaho's Dennis Erickson has already offered a scholarship as a defensive tackle - with Oregon and Washington State in the mix, and Oregon State showing some interest, along with UNLV, Montana and Portland State.

With the mail bringing recruiting letters most every day and half the season yet to play, Bo still has work to do. With goals yet to accomplish, Bill Moos makes it clear that, at Oregon, he does, too.