By Bill Koch
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The University of Cincinnati's move to the Big East Conference may have cost football coach Rick Minter his job.

UC athletic director Bob Goin, who twice extended Minter's contract during his six years as AD, fired him Monday morning because he didn't believe Minter was the man to lift the Bearcats to the next level. He said the school's impending 2005 move to the Big East was a factor.

"We've had 10 years and we're 10 games below .500," Goin said. "But it's also, has the building block leveled off and is it time to go up a step higher?"

Reaction to Minter's firing

• What do you think of the decision to fire Rick Minter? Submit your opinion. • What others are saying

Minter, 49, was 53-63-1 in his 10 years at UC. He leaves as the school's leader in both wins and losses and with the longest tenure of any UC football coach. He was hired in 1994 after serving as defensive coordinator at Notre Dame.

"I wasn't given a lot of reasons why, except this is what we're going to do," Minter said. "I have to respect that. Mr. Goin has been good to me. The university has been good to me."

Goin called his decision "a gut feeling" and said it was made over the course of the season.

"I became convinced at the conclusion of the season that this was the right thing to do," he said. "It came to a point where as you watched our performance, it's not the games we lost as much as some of the games we won. We did some hard struggling with some people.

"It's an evaluation over the six years that I've been here. It's an accumulation of whether we were going to make a big jump or not. We had a great start this year and didn't build on it."

UC began the season with wins vs. East Carolina, West Virginia and Temple. But UC lost seven of its final nine games to finish 5-7, its first losing season since 1999, and its third in the last six years. The Bearcats two wins during that period were close games against winless Army and Division I-AA Rhode Island.

The Bearcats averaged 29,208 fans for their first two home games this year, but attendance declined gradually from that point. They averaged only 18,136 over their last four home games.

"Attendance does bother me," Goin said. "Now we're stepping up and people want to go to the Big East. Well, it's time for us all to do everything in our power to make sure we have an attractive enough program that people want to spend some time here.

"The stakes are higher. There's no question about that."

Minter has three years left on his contract at a base salary of $155,000. He was offered a job as an assistant athletic director, which he said he doesn't know if he'll accept, and will be paid as long as he remains at UC.

Minter said he hopes the decision to fire him wasn't based solely on his team's performance this year, given the loss to graduation of so many quality players off last year's 7-7 New Orleans Bowl team.

"I didn't come into this year saying, 'Hey, wait a minute, we're not going to win this year because we're young and we lost all of our playmakers,' " Minter said. "But that was the reality of it."

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E-mail: bkoch@enquirer.com