Can UConn's program survive without Jim Calhoun?

You'd think that with the men's basketball team winning a national title, the women's basketball team making yet another Final Four, and the football team winning the Big East and earning a Fiesta Bowl bid that UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway would be in line for a well-earned raise.

You'd also be wrong.

According to the New London Day, school president Susan Herbst is in the process of negotiating a buyout to end the UConn tenure of Hathaway, who just so happens to be the 2012 NCAA Tournament chair. The report says that it may take a few weeks to complete the process, but that by September UConn will need a new athletic director.

Herbst responded to the report with a statement on Sunday that all-but confirmed the fact that Hathaway's job is in jeopardy.

"Athletics is a vital part of UConn and there are many ways to evaluate the success of a collegiate athletic department -- academic performance of student-athletes, NCAA compliance, fundraising and overall athletic success," Herbst said in the statement. "We will be excellent stewards of public and private funds in all areas of the University. As a result, I will be reviewing all divisions of the University over time, but with great urgency, to make sure that we are serving this state in the best possible way. Accountability and excellence are our themes, going forward."

"The Division of Athletics is one of those areas of the university in which we have already begun this evaluation process."

There are a couple of reasons why this overthrow is happening after such a successful year of the Husky AD. For starters, there is the issue of compliance. UConn's compliance staff had only two full-time staffers when the men's basketball program got into trouble over the recruitment of Nate Miles. Hathaway has also been slow to find funding for a new hoops practice facility. But the biggest issue is laid out in this terrific column from Jeff Jacobs of the Hartford Courant, who says that Hathaway and Calhoun have a frigid relationship:

Basketball coach Jim Calhoun has made little secret of his distaste for Hathaway. Many sets of ears have heard about that distaste. That's one matter. This is another: Calhoun and his group of supporters, according to one highly placed source, have been angling for Hathaway's ouster. More than that, the source told The Courant that he had been approached to give support to that group.

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Yet it comes down to this: If Hathaway is jettisoned, it will look to folks from coast to coast as if a coach who has just been penalized by the NCAA in the Nate Miles debacle won a power struggle against his athletic director. It will look to all as if a coach who just lost two scholarships and $187,500 out of his pocket for poor Academic Performance Rating schmoozed a new president into guillotining an AD who had put that APR language into his contract.

That doesn't exactly paint Calhoun -- whose has never had a great relationship with Jacobs, either -- in a great light, but it could help explain why the 69 year old head coach who has spent all of July on the recruiting trail has yet to publicly state that he will be returning to the bench next season.

You've heard all of that by now.

The bigger concern, from what I can tell, is that the UConn program is going to be in big trouble when Calhoun leaves.

This is the only program that has won three national titles since 1999, but they -- combined with the nation's most popular and powerful women's basketball program -- can't raise enough money to get a new practice facility? This is the same program that had their student section at the Final Four dwarfed by Butler's, a program that continually struggles to sell-out home games.

The UConn program is Jim Calhoun. His brash demeanor, his surly attitude, and his irreverence for the NCAA Rulebook. There's no other way to put it. When he left Northeastern for Storrs in 1986, UConn was coming off of a 9-19 season and had made just one NCAA Tournament appearance since joining the Big East in 1979. Within four years, he had led UConn to a Big East regular season title, a Big East Tournament title, and a trip to the Elite Eight. In the 20 years since, UConn has become one of the country's premiere basketball programs, winning three national titles, making a fourth Final Four, competing year-in and year-out atop the Big East, and routinely sending players to the NBA.

If the money and the support isn't there to get a new practice facility after Calhoun's third national title -- and by far his most unexpected -- what is going to happen to the program when he's gone? Most believe that Kevin Ollie is currently being groomed as Calhoun's successor, but is that going to be enough?

Maybe Herbst knows this. And, maybe, that's why she's allowing Calhoun to force out his athletic director.