SO NOW BYU, the school that once didn't play in the Fiesta Bowl because it was on the Sabbath Day, is also the school that fired the head of a crippled program a week before Christmas.
Who do they bring in for spin on this one, Dick Morris?I know this sounds harsh, but the fact is, Roger Reid, the beleagured chief of a basketball program that lost its star player to white-collar crime this summer and its star recruit to Duke this fall, was fired as BYU's head coach last Tuesday, eight days before Christmas.
It marks the fourth BYU basketball coach in 24 years to be fired, and every one of them had a winning record. Talk about a tough employer. BYU keeps this up, Kathie Lee Gifford will be organizing pickets.
BYU has become the Lucy of college basketball. Just when a coach gets rolling, he pulls into his parking space only to discover they moved the arena.
Let's see, Glenn Potter got fired for not being Stan Watts; Frank Arnold got fired because he thought he was Stan Watts; Ladell Andersen got fired because his lucky jacket from Mr. Mac's wore out; and Roger Reid got fired because he told star recruit Chris Burgess 9 million Mormons were going to be extremely ticked off.
At least I think that's why all of them were fired. At BYU, it's hard to tell because they never use the F word and when they hold a press conference - always to announce the NEW coach - instead of explaining why the old coach "stepped down," they praise him like he's just made Eagle Scout.
For example, at last week's Tiny Tim Memorial press conference announcing Tony Ingle as interim basketball coach, BYU athletic director Rondo Fehlberg said Roger Reid left "an unparalleled legacy of integrity and success" and "he has been an example of all that's good about BYU and intercollegiate athletics."
That's the guy he just fired.
The motto at BYU: If you can't say something good about someone . . . he must still be on the payroll.
Or just how often over the past seven years have you heard the administration at BYU talk about Roger Reid the way he was talked about last Tuesday?
Last month, when Reid's comment to Burgess, the California high school phenom, became public - and it was Burgess, not Reid, who turned a private comment into a sound bite on the 10 o'clock news - it was Fehlberg who led the cries of consternation. The BYU administration cleared out and let ol' Rog go one on 9 million.
The irony is that Roger was right. Well, maybe not about all 9 million Mormons pouting. But certainly about the portion of that 9 million who care about BYU basketball. If the coaches' point was that the fans would stay away in droves if BYU didn't field a star-studded, winning team, it was a point well taken when all of 3,418 people came to the consolation game of the Cougar Classic to watch a team burrowing its way to a 1-6 start.
In a weird kind of way, Roger Reid prophesied his own doom. He needed Burgess and he knew it - especially in the wake of Bryon Ruffner's troubles with the law. Christian school or not, they're not going to keep you around at BYU unless you win and fill the seats.
Sure, he could have been more diplomatic with his words, even if they were off the record, but everyone can't be LaVell Edwards. BYU certainly had to know what it was getting when it hired Reid seven seasons ago. It was getting Mormondom's answer to Bobby Knight. He might not throw the chair, but he'd sure like to. This is a man with average skills who made it all the way to triple-A baseball because compared to him, Pete Rose looked like a transient sleeping under the freeway. (Personal aside: I remember playing golf once with Roger Reid and he got upset with himself because a couple of the guys we were playing with had better scores. And the thing was, he didn't play golf!).
He has the coaching gene all right. Give him competitiveness or give him nothing at all. He used that coaching gene to overachieve for BYU for seven years and seven games. He even beat Rick Majerus, eight games to seven. No way Roger Reid would have ever quit a fourth of the way into the season, even with the ship leaning, eight freshmen on board, and road trips to Albuquerque, Tulsa and Salt Lake looming like the black death. In athletics it's the one thing you don't do. You don't quit. They'd have had to hogtie him, throw him over the side, turn the sails into the wind, and rush off like a thief in the night, to get rid of him. Which, come to think of it, is just what BYU did.