John Blanchette: Befuddled Few watches ax fall on colleagues
Mark Few told someone the other day that this Gonzaga basketball season felt like a dog year – seven years in one, which is an imperfect calculation but the perfect description.
Going by the calendar, it would have to begin with the way last season ended – that wrenching, wretched finish against UCLA that should have launched the Bulldogs into the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament. The leap of the most celebrated player in school history to the NBA followed shortly thereafter. The events of this season – the highs and hollow moments both extreme – have been endlessly parsed, but there’s another thing that’s weighed on Few.
His friends are being fired, some under ludicrous circumstances.
College basketball – for all the terrific stories like Washington State’s mystical renaissance and Gonzaga’s three-musketeerish finish and this hayride that starts in earnest Thursday – gets ever more toxic at the edges.
“A guy losing his job two years removed from a Sweet 16 is crazy,” Few said. “Firing a guy to protect yourself in case his team goes on a run is insane.”
Yes, and churn is a constant of coaching life. Schools and coaches insist on buyout clauses in their contracts to insure themselves against the inevitability, so excessive hand-wringing seems pointless.
Still, no fewer than 27 jobs have come open before the NCAA tournament’s real tipoff, and this before the job-jumpers have accelerated the dominoes. Last year, 62 of the 336 Division I schools changed coaches.
It’s money, it’s TV, it’s expectation morphing into demand, it’s bad leadership, it’s a little of everything.
It’s even – maybe especially – this tournament.
Only 65 teams aren’t seen as failures. Even some of those have a coach who is unemployed but just doesn’t know it yet.
“I just talked with a good friend of mine, Murray Bartow at East Tennessee State,” Few said the other day. “They won their league and had a phenomenal year and he was saying just how hollow and bad he felt. It just seemed crazy to me.
“Maybe I’m old school, but winning your league is still a big deal and needs to be treated as such.”
And then there are the cases that cut Few close to the bone.
Dan Monson, who helped steer Few to Gonzaga as an assistant 18 years ago and “the reason I’m in this position,” was fired at Minnesota in November. Ray Giacoletti, the former Eastern Washington coach and an especially close friend, was axed near season’s end after just three years at Utah – though the athletic director continues to comically insist it was a resignation. Dick Davey, Santa Clara’s head coach for 15 years, was pressured into announcing his “retirement” just days before the Broncos jumped into first place in the West Coast Conference. And last week, Few became the dean of WCC coaches when San Diego fired Brad Holland – the last coach other than Few to win the WCC tournament.
Few is as grounded in reality as anyone, but some of the circumstances leave him mystified and furious.
Giacoletti, for instance, had the Utes in the Sweet 16 in his first season, but two difficult years later was besieged by Internet jackals and bedeviled by the increasingly empty seats at home games.
“But to fire a guy two years after a Sweet 16 is unprecedented unless there’s cheating involved,” Few said. “If that becomes the norm, look out.”
Yet even more bizarre was Davey’s dismissal, done as it was to a tireless servant by an administration that was afraid he’d win a championship and stir up so much public goodwill that they couldn’t move him out at season’s end.
“That’s so incredibly backward it’s ludicrous,” Few said. “Pull the plug on a guy in case he goes on a run? It reminds me of what you see in baseball – ‘We’ve got a six-game homestand coming up, so let’s get rid of the manager now in case he goes 6-0. Let’s saw him off before it gets too crazy.’ “
Holland’s firing was more traditional, but just as problematic. USD athletic director Ky Snyder keeps saying the Toreros need to be in the “upper quartile” of the WCC – meaning that, nice guy or not, don’t finish third, and keep Gonzaga better company.
“Simply put, that institution doesn’t support basketball in the same way this one does,” Few said. “So that’s not the coach’s fault. That’s the athletic director’s or the president’s responsibility. He’s winning 18 games a year, knocking on the door, graduating guys and not having any NCAA violations. Look at somebody else, because the basketball product he was putting out there was very good.”
Not surprisingly, Few resists the notion – put forth by Holland, among others – of the “Gonzaga syndrome,” that WCC coaches have seen their jobs get harder because of the Zags’ success.
“Guys have been losing jobs in this league long before we started our run, and for the same old reasons,” he said. “But if that is the case, then the presidents and ADs need to be held accountable for not raising the level of support the way Fr. Spitzer and Mike Roth have here. What they’re allowing their teams to do in scheduling, in facilities, support, everything.
“It just seems like the tenor and landscape is changing. The impatience is at an all-time high and the expectations don’t reflect reality. And the Internet as a place to vent and voice untruths and see those gain a lot of traction has increased to a dangerous point.”
It can make for a long year. Or a short career.