Kansas University chancellor Robert Hemenway, left, and athletic director Lew Perkins visit with an audience member following a news conference concerning the NCAA's response to infractions committed by KU. Hemenway and Perkins discussed the NCAA-imposed penalties at Hadl Auditorium.

Four years ago this week, many a jaw dropped when Lew Perkins was named Kansas University athletic director.

Supposedly entrenched at Connecticut, Perkins opted to change jobs essentially because KU chancellor Robert Hemenway dangled the proverbial offer Perkins couldn’t refuse – a salary and compensation package worth around $1 million a year.

“I think one thing it signifies,” Hemenway said at the time of Perkins’ hiring, “is we’re not happy, and we don’t want to be in the bottom quarter of the Big 12 Conference.”

Then, after Perkins had been on the job for several months, Hemenway went way out on a limb.

“We want to make our school the model for the rest of the country,” the chancellor said. “We don’t want to be in the top 25. We want to be the top one.”

Hemenway made that pie-in-the-sky comment to an athletics advisory group composed mostly of professors, but those words were pure political rhetoric. KU has about as much chance of reaching No. 1 as Paris Hilton does of becoming manager of the Yankees.

How do you determine who’s No. 1 in college athletics? The accepted standard is a poll compiled by NACDA, the national organization of college athletic directors.

Kansas sank to a lowly 108th in that poll during the final year of Al Bohl’s bumbling stint as Kansas AD in 2003. Then, in Perkins’ first year, Kansas ascended to 65th, to 61st the next year and to 60th last year.

It would be nice to report that Kansas will take at least another baby step in 2006-2007, but that won’t be the case. With only baseball remaining to be added to the compilations, Kansas stands in 82nd place on the NACDA chart. In other words, KU athletics has taken a disappointing step backwards.

If the decline is a just a glitch – the athletics equivalent of a stock market correction – then the thousands of people who pour millions of dollars into the Williams Fund should remain bullish on KU athletics.

But if KU sports teams continue to slip or even to tread water next year, the tendency will be to believe Kansas can’t completely cure its competitive woes by throwing money at the problem, and will remain a second-division Big 12 school with a first-division budget.

As you may recall, Perkins announced 18 months ago a five-year strategic plan that contained ambitious goals for excellence in academics, fund-raising, community relations, facilities and, of course, athletics. Perkins’ stated goal was to finish in the NACDA top 25 by the year 2011.

“We expect you to hold us accountable,” Perkins said.

Whether Kansas can climb from 82nd place into the top 25 over the next four years is debatable. KU, for instance, has never ranked higher than 28th (1993-94) and winning was easier in those fast-fading Big Eight Conference days.

Four years is a long time, though. So long, in fact, that Perkins may not even be the Jayhawks’ AD. Two years from now, he will qualify for a tax-free retention payment of $1.3 million and, at the age of 64, he could conceivably take that money and run.

Regardless, something Perkins said on his first day on the job continues to ring true as he begins his fifth year on Mount Oread.

“It’s going to be,” Perkins said of the task ahead, “a bitch, a real bitch.”