The John L. Toner Award. UConn is a football blue blood.

[UConnJim]

The John L. Toner Award is awarded to the AD who has demonstrated superior administrative abilities and shown outstanding dedication to college athletics and PARTICULARLY college football. The first recipient was John Toner from UConn in 1997. Here is the list of award winners which is a who's who of FBS football ADs:

John Toner - UConn
Doug Dickey - Tennessee
Jake Crouthamel - Syracuse and Davy Nelson - Delaware
Frank Broyles - Arkansas
Mike Lude - Washington/Auburn
Bill Byrne - Oregon/Nebraska/Texas A&M
Andy Geiger - Ohio St.
Vince Dooley - Georgia
Jack Lengyal - Navy
Deloss Dodds - Texas
Jeremy Foley - Florida
Gene Smith Ohio St.
Jim Weaver - VIrginia Tech
Bob Mulcahy - Rutgers
Mal Moore - Alabama

 

[TRest]

Toner was a really nice guy. He and his wife lived in a 2 family in New Britain with my parents when they were all just starting out in the 50's. Decades later my father had me look him up when I was just a frosh on campus and he was AD, he spent over an hour chatting in his office and showed me an architectural model of an expanded Memorial Stadium on its old site, it looked kind of like what BC did with their small footprint.

 

[Adios]

He got us into the Big East, after all. Now look where we are. A spoiled fanbase.

 

[jdb50]

JC and Geno get alot of credit for where they have taken UConn athletics but John Toner had the vison that we could rise above where we were as a New England program. He is a class act all the way and in many ways the foundation of UConn athletics along with Dee Rowe and Andy Baylock. Too bad we were never able to get the first proposed 15,000 seat basketball arena built in Storrs before the Hartford politicians got involved and we wound up at Gampel's original 8,200.

 

[Waquoit]

JC and Geno get alot of credit for where they have taken UConn athletics but John Toner had the vison that we could rise above where we were as a New England program.

Vision without a plan is meaningless. He talked the upgrade in football but that's all it was, talk. He added some tougher teams to the schedule, but never gave the FB program the added tools to improve. When Toner was AD he refused to can Perno when it was clear he wasn't the man for the job, saying he felt that UConn had a chance to get in the Top 5 of the Big East within 5 years. Talk about low expectations. They set up a committee to investigate his performance just like they did for Hathaway. He was called an "absentee AD" in the final report. He was forced out of the position. He was the Fred Garvin of AD's. Lousy at the job but because he was seen as a nice guy they went easy on him. It's no accident the the athletic department started to progress once he was gone.

 

[UConnJim]

Vision without a plan is meaningless. He talked the upgrade in football but that's all it was, talk. He added some tougher teams to the schedule, but never gave the FB program the added tools to improve. When Toner was AD he refused to can Perno when it was clear he wasn't the man for the job, saying he felt that UConn had a chance to get in the Top 5 of the Big East within 5 years. Talk about low expectations. They set up a committee to investigate his performance just like they did for Hathaway. He was called an "absentee AD" in the final report. He was forced out of the position. He was the Fred Garvin of AD's. Lousy at the job but because he was seen as a nice guy they went easy on him. It's no accident the the athletic department started to progress once he was gone.

Wow! Considering he got UConn into the Big East, hired Geno Auriemma and Jim Calhoun and oversaw the construction of Gampel, I would say he did a lot for UConn. I wish Jeff Hathaway had done 1/4 as well!

 

[jdb50]

Vision without a plan is meaningless. He talked the upgrade in football but that's all it was, talk. He added some tougher teams to the schedule, but never gave the FB program the added tools to improve. When Toner was AD he refused to can Perno when it was clear he wasn't the man for the job, saying he felt that UConn had a chance to get in the Top 5 of the Big East within 5 years. Talk about low expectations. They set up a committee to investigate his performance just like they did for Hathaway. He was called an "absentee AD" in the final report. He was forced out of the position. He was the Fred Garvin of AD's. Lousy at the job but because he was seen as a nice guy they went easy on him. It's no accident the the athletic department started to progress once he was gone.

He was overly patient with Perno but that was his makeup, steady would be the word to describe him. He eventually had to make the call. He was also involved at the upper levels of the NCAA and this led to the absentee AD charge. He did set the table for UConn to get better and start the climb out of small minded parochial thinking that dominated the entire school.

 

[Carl Spackler]

John Toner sat square in the middle of the court proceedings that changed all of intercollegiate athletics in the early 1980s when he was in charge of the NCAA. He knew the importance of what was going on around television broadcast rights and college football. Dom Perno, and the UCONN basketball program, were pretty far down on his priority list, I think, at the time. He had already handled getting UCONN into a league of parochial urban basketball playing schools, and gotten us hooked into that television revenue stream.

No one is perfect, but to knock on Toner, for the job he did at UCONN, around Dom Perno, is being a little short sighted of the big picture. Toner's words in front of the government committee in Washington in 1984, are incredibly prophetic, as to the state of all of intercollegiate athletics now nearly 30 years later. Unfortunately, his voice, and the voices of other football TITANS (Jim Delany, Joe Paterno, Eddie Robinson, et. al,) fell on ears that were either deaf, or had no power to change anything the supreme court had done with Oklahoma v. Board of Regents.

Toner's biggest failure IMO, has nothing to do with Dom Perno, and everything to do with his failure to communicate the importance of football to the Big East conference leadership in the 1980s, although given the situation and success of 1980's big east basketball, it was probably more realistic to convince the House of Representative Committee members of that what was happening was wrong, than it would be to convince Gavitt, and the priests in the 1980s that the direction of football would be driving the force for intercollegiate athletics in the future.

 

[UConn9604]

Toner also deserves a great deal of credit for the development of ESPN. Listen to Bill Rasmussen give a talk sometime -- he regularly mentions how important Toner, Phil Barry, etc., were to ESPN from the very outset. He's very, very respectful of all that Toner added.

 

[Waquoit]

Wow! Considering he got UConn into the Big East, hired Geno Auriemma and Jim Calhoun and oversaw the construction of Gampel, I would say he did a lot for UConn. I wish Jeff Hathaway had done 1/4 as well!

He gets credit for Geno, but he didn't hire Calhoun that was done by a committee. As far as getting UConn into the Big East, if Holy Cross says yes, we are UMass. And as far as "overseeing" Gampel, IIRC that was a face-saving position created as a soft landing. He was basically fired.

He was also involved at the upper levels of the NCAA and this led to the absentee AD charge. He did set the table for UConn to get better and start the climb out of small minded parochial thinking that dominated the entire school.

Involved? He was Mark Emmert, while still collecting a full UConn salary. He didn't start any climb, the UConn athletic department then was like Seton Hall now. Just content to cash checks based on the efforts of others. UConn's climb started the day he left.