Boylen and the Long Walk

I’ve already predicted Utah basketball coach Jim Boylen would be fired. deseretnews.com

By the time your read this, he may be unpacking his locker.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll be dancing with glee. Good guys fail sometimes, too.

Boylen can be profane, but a lot of fans read his sideline theatrics as being abusive. Yet I haven’t heard his players say that. From what I know of him, he’s a good person who built himself up from a hardscrabble youth. He’s a positive thinker, a grateful man. Heaven knows the country needs plenty of those.

But by the time I wrote that Feb.16 column, I had realized the program had sunk too low to recover. Even if his team believes in him the way it has been saying, his fans don’t.

In the interest of full disclosure, a month before the aformentioned column, I said I wasn’t going to call for his ouster just then. deseretnews.com I just thought with his family health issues, he deserved to get to the end of the season without being fired on the spot.

“That’s for another day and another column,” I wrote.

A month later, on Feb. 16, I felt I couldn’t ignore the direction the program had gone. I didn’t advocate they fire him midseason – the way Wyoming did with Heath Schroyer – but I did say it was too late for him to save his program.

Was I being duplicitous? Some say yes. But time makes a picture more focused. Even in January, I pointed out the direction the program was headed. I just thought that at the season’s midway point, he needed to deal with his personal problems and focus on coaching. At that time I mentioned he and Chris Hill could talk after the season. By mid-February, the slide had become irreversible.

Hill, the athletic director, did the right thing in waiting until season’s end to address the issue. Now it’s time for him to do the right thing and make a change.

There’s too much at stake to wait longer.

In case you’d like to take a walk down memory lane and remember Ray Giacoletti’s last day at Utah, here’s this: deseretnews.com