Well before Forrest Gump gave us the "box of chocolates" analogy of life, Stan Sheriff offered the "apple pie" theory on athletic directors.

Sheriff was athletic director at Northern Iowa and the University of Hawai'i, two schools that posthumously named facilities for him, and came to believe that an AD's employment is measured like an apple pie.

With each crisis, Sheriff used to say, a slice (the bigger the crisis, the bigger the piece) was subtracted until, eventually, there was an empty pie tin and, hence, an exit.

Clearly, the Herman Frazier model pie is a lot like his current football schedule, showing some glaring pukas.

And this latest crisis seems destined to take a huge bite out of that pie. For Frazier, UH's AD of five years now, the whole mess is moving past being just a scheduling issue even before he deals with the two missing games. Now it has become a question of confidence — or lack thereof — in the man charged with running the state's only NCAA Division I athletic program.

Fans, even the ones willing to ante up for season-ticket renewals or plunk down a $50 deposit on new ones, bless them, are doing it on faith. Not in Frazier certainly, but in the Warriors and Colt Brennan. They are upholding their role of supporters even as the man charged with running the place has dawdled in his.

The longer this scheduling fiasco continues — and the calendar says it is spring now — the more it reinforces the perception of dithering at the top. The closer we get to what should be the kickoff of the 2007 season, the more the focus is on the main office and the man who sits there.

Not just by the media. But among the stakeholders in the seats, like the ones who sent a torrent of boos Frazier's way in the men's basketball home finale. And among some staffers, boosters, coaches and people around UH. People who bought what he was selling earlier and now don't seem so sure. Folks who once viewed the absence of a schedule as fertile one-liner material — Question: Why doesn't the AD take a bus? Answer: He doesn't know the schedule. — and now see in it reason to question his administration.

You might not grasp a working capital deficit measured in seven figures, but the lack of a football schedule hits home. Scheduling would seem the most basic of an AD's duties. AD 101 as it were. Especially when it involves the department's cash cow, football.

Page 2 of Frazier's $250,000-a-year contract notes, among other duties, he is charged to "maintain responsibility for the scheduling of university sports events, long-term planning for all aspects of the department's operations."

Frazier will eventually finish off the schedule, but the questions the whole episode have raised are reflected in that thinning pie tin.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.