Seattle ? From the beginning, hiring Rick Neuheisel was Barbara Hedges’ most dramatic roll of the dice.

She gambled he wasn’t the slick spinmeister his critics claimed he was. She gambled he could win with his own players the way he won with former coach Bill McCartney’s at Colorado.

From the beginning, she seemed to be taken by his boyish good looks and his smooth, silver-tongued delivery.

She thought, from the beginning, he was the perfect coach for the wine-and-cheese elite, the foundation of support for Washington’s football program.

She saw Neuheisel as the ideal salesman for her school. He was smart, well-spoken and just enough of a ham to keep her school in the news. She expected Washington, under Neuheisel, to be the talk of ESPN’s “College GameDay” crew.

She expected him to rebuild a program that she mistakenly thought had lost a step under Jim Lambright.

She was wrong, across the board. The only thing she has been right about with Neuheisel is his ability to keep Washington’s football program in the news.

If he wasn’t in the news for lying to her and to the media about his interview for the coaching vacancy of the San Francisco 49ers, he was on TV testifying in Philadelphia during the NCAA’s investigation of his manifold misdeeds at Colorado.

She expected Neuheisel to restore glory to Washington football. Instead he has brought embarrassment.

Barbara Hedges, Washington’s athletic director, staked her reputation on Neuheisel, and now the reputation appears to be inextricably sullied, along with the future of her football coach.

And as lawyers wrestle over the terms of Neuheisel’s surrender, Hedges’ own future should be called into question.

Hiring Neuheisel was wrong from the get-go. The venom that flowed out of Boulder after he ran his fly pattern out of Colorado was a harbinger of Washington’s future.

He was her mistake by the lake, and those mistakes kept coming.

Almost from the day he was hired, Neuheisel made indiscreet phone calls to his Colorado recruits, asking them to come to Washington. Later, he got his program in trouble when his assistants made illegal recruiting visits.

Through it all, Hedges stood by her man.

Even as he was testifying in Philadelphia, just before the NCAA announced its sanctions against him for his Colorado capers, Hedges was finalizing the terms of an interest-free $1.5 million loan to Neuheisel from the university.

What had he done to deserve that?

And if this now-famous e-mail from compliance director Dana Richardson, which Neuheisel mistakenly believed earlier this week would exonerate him, were so important and so widely circulated, why didn’t Hedges mention its existence last Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday?

If Richardson was wrong, as it now appears she was, why didn’t Hedges correct the e-mail before it was too late?

The university certainly has just cause to fire Neuheisel. He gambled on college sports. He broke NCAA rules again.

But whither Hedges?

Certainly she is culpable. She hired Neuheisel.