Robert Driscoll Jr., in November of 2001, when he became athletic director at PC.

The Providence Journal / MARY MURPHY

PROVIDENCE – Bob Driscoll is now on the clock.

Driscoll is in his seventh year as the athletic director at Providence College but he made his first major decision yesterday when the school decided not to honor the final year of basketball coach Tim Welsh’s contract. Now it’s time to make an even more important assessment.

There will be plenty of candidates for Welsh’s job. It pays well (upward of $800,000 a year), most of the games you coach are on nationally TV, and an entire state will adore you if you win enough basketball games. But as Welsh — and other previous PC coaches — discovered, nothing comes easily.

After meeting with Welsh yesterday morning and conceding that it was “a difficult day for everybody here,” Driscoll said he was ready to throw himself into the process of finding a new coach. He’ll be a one-man search committee. A hockey player and coach at Ithaca and Union colleges, Driscoll came to PC from the University of California-Berkley, where he worked with the men’s basketball program, and he’s established more relationships as a member of the NCAA’s Management Council.

Driscoll does not have one, clear-cut, candidate in mind for the job. PC’s friends at the Big East office won’t be pushing one individual, either. This will truly be a “search” process.

“There will be no search committee,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 33 years and I have enough people that I respect in the business that will give me the proper advice. I will do it by myself, in conjunction with Father (Brian) Shanley (PC’s president) and we will make a decision. When we make the hire, we’ll bring the person on campus.

“I’m a hockey player. I’m a coach. But I have to rely on the intellect of the basketball minds,” Driscoll added. “I can’t tell you X’s and O’s, but I can tell you about organization and passion and those things, but I’ll rely on a lot of other people.”

What’s the profile of a coach who can win big at Providence College? The Friars will never be able to get the premier recruits in the country, but they’ll need some very good players in order to compete against Louisville, Connecticut, Georgetown and the other giants in the Big East. That means the job requires not only someone to steal an occasional top recruit but someone to spot plenty of “sleepers” on the recruiting trail. He’ll also need to be able to improve players’ skill levels at a rapid rate.

PC has never enjoyed what you’d call a healthy string of success in the 29 years of the Big East. There have been good seasons, for sure, including the 1987 Final Four run by Rick Pitino and the Elite Eight campaign in `97 with Pete Gillen as coach. But the Friars had losing records after both great years. A coach who can find his way to the NCAA Tournament, win a game or two, and then do it again is what PC is really searching for.

“Cultural fit is important for me,” Driscoll said. “I want someone who continues to have great passion and who really believes in their heart that we can compete at the highest level.”

Driscoll will probably aim high out of the gate, and if he can’t hit a home run, he’ll look for a rising star in the profession. Age is a major determining factor. If he’s looking for an experienced winner to match wits with Big East legends such as Pitino, Jim Boeheim and Bob Huggins, he can look at Jim Larranaga or Bob McKillop. Some PC fans are clamoring for 58-year old Larranaga, a PC alum who has George Mason back in the NCAA Tournament this season after leading the Patriots to the Final Four in 2006. McKillop, 57, is a New Yorker who’s made Davidson College the elite program in the Southern Conference.

Both those coaches will lead their team into this week’s NCAA Tournament. Other tourney-bound coaches PC should look at include Phil Martelli (St. Joseph’s), Jim Christian (Kent State) and Kevin O’Neill, the interim coach at Arizona who’ll move back to an assistant’s post next year, when Lute Olson returns from a year off. Former URI assistants Tim O’Shea (Ohio University) and Bill Coen (Northeastern) are regarded as keen judges of talent, and if it’s true that Georgia Tech’s Paul Hewitt could be under fire, he’d be an outstanding candidate to jump to the Big East.

There are also some coaches who could be termed “rolls of the dice.” Leading that pack is someone such as Craig Robinson, the Brown coach who led the Bears to a school-record 19 wins. He’s been a head coach for only two seasons but is so highly regarded that Providence could be beaten to the punch by other schools if it has interest in him.

The new coach will inherit a strong group of returnees led by five seniors. Even Welsh insists that “the players are here to do it. No injuries and a commitment from these guys to drive harder and they can have a great year. That’s what I told them to do.”

Driscoll said he cut ties with Welsh not because of the Friars’ 15-16 season this year but because of a 10-year run of uneven success he clearly thinks can end.

“With change comes great opportunity and renewed energy. That was the reason why I made the decision,” he said. “The other reason is I have a high expectation for men’s basketball here at Providence College. This perception that we can never be successful or that we’re happy with just getting to the Big East (Tournament), well, that goes against every bit of my core being. My goal is to win the Big East championship. Will we get there? Time will tell. But there’s no reason we can’t finish in the upper half of that league, and if you do that on a consistent basis, you’ll get to the (NCAA) Tournament.”

Driscoll then defended his program’s infrastructure. PC will play in an $80-million, rehabilitated Dunkin’ Donuts Center next year, has a first-class weight-training facility and is a few months away from completing an updated training room. He also intends on pouring money into an outdated Mullaney Gymnasium, where the team practices 95 percent of the time.

“I can look at Georgetown and at Marquette, particularly Georgetown four or five years ago, and they were nowhere near in the mix. Those schools have been able to do it,” he said. “If you look at the leadership here and the facilities we’ve built, with what’s happening downtown at the new Dunk, the money we’re raising, there’s no question in my mind that we can get there. Now we have to prove that we can get there; but that’s the reason I made this decision — because of the expectations that we have.”

Driscoll said he might travel to NCAA tourney sites to watch some coaches, but he’ll mostly call advisers and contact coaches once their teams lose.

“I’d like to do it as quickly as I can, but I don’t want to put a strict time line on it because if there are people I want to talk to who are continuing on, obviously I can’t do that,” he said. “In an ideal world, you’d want someone on board by the conclusion of the Final Four, but I don’t know. I want to take as much time as necessary to do the best job I can to get the right person. It’s fluid.”

kmcnamar@projo.com