LITTLE ROCK — On one hand, it looks like Dean Lee’s reward for getting Gus Malzahn to be the head football coach at Arkansas State was to be reassigned from his job as athletic director.

Lee drove straight through Mississippi and most of Alabama, more than 400 miles, to talk to Malzahn and convince him to take a $550,000 cut in pay as Auburn’s offensive coordinator and become the head coach of the Red Wolves, a job Malzahn had declined to interview for 10 years earlier.

Lee got the coach the fans wanted — he was also responsible for hiring basketball coach John Brady, who took LSU to the NCAA Final Four — then before Malzahn coached a game, with fan fever rising rapidly, Lee was moved to a fundraising arm of the campus.

Which is a bit ironic, since he most likely got transferred because he didn’t seem able to raise enough donations for athletics.

But Lee has a guaranteed contract and was going to get paid for almost three years anyway.

If everyone is totally honest, and this is not a popular thing to say, but all of college athletics has changed.

It is about the money, at least from the administration’s standpoint.

New ASU Chancellor Tim Hudson is a man with vision and some of that includes athletics. He announced a plan to raise $25 million over the next four years to upgrade the football operations center, suites at ASU Stadium (he might want to start by finding a title sponsor for the stadium), and possibly an indoor football practice facility and a basketball practice facility.

Lee had been successful as a fundraiser at Oklahoma State before coming to ASU on July 9, 2002, but obviously it is easier to raise money at a school where T. Boone Pickens is the No. 1 booster.

Also consider that the hiring of Malzahn and his staff increased the football budget 72.8 percent in payroll alone.

Which explains why the Red Wolves will play at No. 5 Oregon and at No. 16 Nebraska this fall.

Those type of guaranteed money games can go a long way to help pay for a $13.4 million athletic budget, but they won’t pay for anywhere close to all of it.

There is even some rumors that Hudson would like to raise enough money to move out of the Sun Belt.

Lee wasn’t available for comment Tuesday when the reassignment was announced, but released a statement Wednesday saying he was grateful for the past 10 years, that Arkansas State Athletics has a very bright future and he joined the program as an Indian and became a Red Wolf.

A nice touch. The right thing to do.

No one could ever complain about the way Lee managed the athletic department.

Not long after he was hired, he used his contacts at Arkansas — he once worked at the Razorbacks Foundation — to get an audience with then Director of Athletics Frank Broyles.

He didn’t go in on his knees and ask for advice; his first question was would Broyles schedule ASU in football and basketball.

He was on a mission to make everything better, from the first day to his last as ASU athletic director.

Whether it was hiring Brady or Malzahn, scheduling big-dollar opponents or trying to get statewide attention for the Red Wolves, his intentions were always good.

A new era has arrived in college athletics, and Lee was reassigned to make room for the vision of the future.

Sports, Pages 13 on 08/09/2012