Vic Cegles: AD at Long Beach State.

Mike O'Brien: AD at Toledo.

Steve Patterson: Former general manager of the NBA's Rockets and Trail Blazers; former senior vice president for the NFL's Texans.

Mack Rhoades: AD at Akron.

John Robinson: Acting AD at UH.

Todd Stansbury: Associate AD at Oregon State.

Six candidates have come to light as the front-runners to become the next University of Houston athletic director.

Two UH insiders said Monday that the candidates in the mix are Akron AD Mack Rhoades, Oregon State associate AD Todd Stansbury, Toledo AD Mike O'Brien, acting UH AD John Robinson Jr., Long Beach State AD Vic Cegles, and former Rockets and Texans executive Steve Patterson.

Rhodes, a former executive senior associate AD at UTEP, has been at Akron since 2006. He was at the forefront of getting built on the Akron campus a football stadium that will open in September. Earlier this year, he was a finalist for the Rutgers opening in a search conducted by Parker Executive Search, the same head-hunting firm UH hired to find a replacement for the retired Dave Maggard.

Stansbury is a former UH associate AD who became the senior associate AD at Oregon State in 2004. He is a former assistant AD at Georgia Tech, where he was a linebacker. After a stint as AD at East Tennessee State, Stansbury went to Oregon State and has been part of a management team that has taken on more than $115 million in capital projects.

O'Brien is a former Lamar AD (1993-1997) who has been running the Toledo program since 2002. Toledo has had an array of capital projects on O'Brien's watch, including the renovation of its Basketball facility (Savage Arena) and the construction of the two-story Charles A. Sullivan Athletic Complex in 2008. The school broke ground late last month on a new indoor practice facility.

Robinson was the right-hand man of Maggard for nearly seven years and has been involved in every aspect of the UH program, from fund-raising to hiring coaches to handling the budget. He was an associate AD at Villanova before coming to UH in 2002.

Cegles has been the athletic director at Long Beach since 2006, re-organizing the department by bringing in extra staff for marketing, development and fund-raising. He spent 2003 to 2006 at Temple, putting in place a similar reorganization of fund-raising efforts. He also spent 16 years in the Arizona State athletic department.

Patterson has been an executive for nearly 25 years in the NBA, NFL and professional hockey. Along with having been the general manager of the Rockets and Trail Blazers, Patterson was a Texans senior vice president and part of the movement to bring an NFL team to Houston. A former president of the Aeros hockey team, Patterson is president of Pro Sports Consulting.

One person close to the program said Rhoades and Patterson have been in Houston to interview for the job. Rhoades did not return phone calls about the job, keeping in line with Parker Search's insistence that candidates not comment publicly on pending searches. Reached by text message, Patterson would not comment on the UH situation.

steve.campbell@chron.com