Twenty-two seasons as a head coach, 11 as an assistant, five players taken in the first round of the NFL draft, three Pac-10 Conference and one national coach of the year award, always leaving each place better than he found it, and still nobody would touch Mike Price.

What changed that equation, finally, was a program as down on its luck as he was.

“We know Mike Price is a man who has been humbled by a highly public mistake,” University of Texas-El Paso president Diana Natalicio said Sunday, introducing her school’s new football coach. “He paid dearly for that grievous error in judgment, and all of us believe he has earned the opportunity to restart his career.”

The sad truth is that not everybody in college football believed that. Otherwise, Price would have had his chance before now.

A dozen such opportunities came and went already this season in Division I-A, at powerhouses like Nebraska, second-tier programs like Arizona and Mississippi, even at perennial also-rans like Eastern Michigan, Idaho and Akron. Not one offered Price so much as an interview.

“I feel reborn,” he said at the news conference announcing his hiring. But Price was hardly the only person in attendance with revival on his mind.

UTEP has won 14 games in the past four seasons, made it to a bowl game just once in the last 15, and claimed one league title in the last 44. Besides, he came cheap. And if Price was the least bit bothered by starting over, at age 57, at the bottom rung of the coaching ladder, he wasn’t saying so for public consumption.

“I think this is the right situation. My dad told me a long time ago if you go somewhere where you’re wanted and needed, your chances for success are a lot better,” Price said. “I want to be here.”

He wanted to be a few other places, to be sure, and most of them needed him, too. When Frank Solich got the ax at Nebraska, the chance of Price succeeding him was treated as a joke. One internet gambling site listed his odds at 15,000-to-1. When he threw his own hat into the ring for the vacancy at Arizona, university president Peter Likins threw it back, saying Price “will never be in the picture.”

What opened him up to such ridicule and scorn certainly wasn’t Price’s resume. He won more than enough in 14 seasons at Washington State to be a legitimate contender at Nebraska and accomplished more with less than a Pac-10 also-ran like Arizona dreams about.

What submarined his chances were a few other sheets of paper, stories in newspapers and magazines about a boozy, well-publicized night seven months ago spent in the company of strippers.

A year ago, on Dec. 18, Price was announced as the head coach at Alabama. He never bothered to sign the seven-year, $10-million deal that was on the table, but talked reverentially about walking along the same sideline Paul “Bear” Bryant once trod, and he got to do that in March. There were 34,000 witnesses in the stands at Bryant-Denny Stadium that day, as Alabama wrapped up its first spring practice under Price, with the Crimson beating the White 47-0. Two weeks later, he returned to the South to play golf in a pro-am at Pensacola, Fla.

What happened later that night is the subject of a $20 million libel suit that Price has filed against Sports Illustrated author Don Yaeger and Time Inc., the magazine’s parent company. There isn’t room to list the specifics here; it’s enough to say that Price’s own version of events so shamed himself and his family that in terms of consequences, losing the Alabama job came in a distant second.

His reputation trashed, Price slipped into depression and lost 40 pounds. He went to a few Washington State games and sat, anonymously, in the stands. Last month, an Associated Press reporter talked to him on the telephone from a relative’s home in Washington, and Price said, “I would think I would have a good chance to get a job anywhere if it wasn’t for an hour and a half of my life.”

George O’Leary knew exactly what Price meant. His sin was inflating a resume, and O’Leary’s rise and fall took place at Notre Dame two years ago, but they were the same age and their careers traced the same arc. Both got their breaks after long apprenticeships, ran honest, successful programs once they wound up in charge, and only then did either cast a longing glance in the direction of the big-time.

Neither will enjoy that view again anytime soon. In both cases, it’s taken longer than it should for competence to trump phony morality, but that corner has finally been turned. O’Leary got his chance at rehabilitation at Central Florida less than two weeks ago, hired away from the Minnesota Vikings, where a friend and former player gave him a job as an assistant. Price’s break came in part because UTEP athletic director Bob Stull has known him for 20 years, dating to their days in the Pac-10 working on opposing sidelines.

Back then, Price made his reputation by giving marginal players at Washington State more than one chance. Buffalo Bills quarterback Drew Bledsoe, one of the five first-round picks off those Cougars teams, called Price “a guy who has had as much positive influence on my life as anybody I have worked with. ... Anyone should be proud to have Mike Price as their head coach.”

It took longer than it should have, but at least somebody is again.

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