It’s usually the other way around for schools such as Kansas and Kansas State. The status of the football and basketball coaches might look iffy while the chancellor-president and athletic directors are firmly entrenched.

Yet both KU and K-State are in the market for new top dogs while their main-sport coaches seem solidly set. Could the chancellor-prexy changes alter the status of athletic directors Lew Perkins and Bob Krause? Krause’s tenure appears considerably shakier than Lew’s.

Kansas has Mark Mangino and Bill Self with lucrative long-term contracts for football and basketball while Chancellor Robert Hemenway is stepping down after the current academic year. Normally you find the coaches either seeking new jobs or getting fired while the prexies are etched in stone.

AD Perkins, now 63, will reach a major milestone at KU next June when he can claim a $1.3 million tax-free, six-year longevity bonus at age 64. Lew has just hired Nicole Corcoran as his chief of staff, as of Feb. 2. That being the case, it doesn’t look as if he’s planning to take the money and run, not with something like a $650,000 annual wage-benefit package for as long as he’s on the job.

(Wonder if Corcoran can take some of the pressure off righthand man Jim Marchiony, who almost invariably has to absorb the heat for Perkins while seldom getting the credit he deserves for walking a tightrope while under fire. If Lew left, would Marchiony be the successor?)

Question: Will the new KU chancellor give Perkins the blank check and freedom to wheel and deal as freely as did Hemenway, who hired Lew? KU faces a lot more severe challenges than an athletic director restructuring; the new chancellor will find this far down on his to-do list so no changes likely.

A common joke among KU fans that Perkins will have major input into the hiring of a chancellor while returning K-State football coach Bill Snyder will call a lot of shots in the selection of a new president. Don’t laugh. The ever-present Perkins is a powerful money-raiser with massive clout in influential circles. Snyder and outgoing KSU president Jon Wefald were deep and abiding soulmates for a long time. The formulas are there.

K-State’s Krause is seen by some as an interim athletic director, replacing, for now, Tim Weiser, who left for a Big 12 job. Frank Martin seems to have a solid base for continuing as basketball coach, and Snyder exudes a near-god aura among the Purple People. Will Bill get dibs on major input for both a new president and athletic director?

A number of critics think Wefald and Hemenway have been letting the athletic tail wag the academic dog for a long time. With them gone, will the front offices take more or have less control as long as the money rolls in and sufficient victories are logged? You win, you cruise.

Many times people in collegiate administration can fend off critics with inventive humor. Back in Oklahoma’s earlier glory days when the Sooners owned football in the Big Seven-Eight and enjoyed constant national prominence, gregarious OU president George Cross was asked about the gridiron-potent atmosphere at Norman.

With that winning grin, Cross declared: “All we’re trying to do is create a university the football team can be proud of.”

Can K-State do that for Snyder; will KU hire somebody with Hemenway’s jockular, pro-Perkins tendencies?