In an instant on Monday afternoon, Utah assistant coach Josh Eilert’s role changed as Utah athletic director Mark Harlan announced Monday that the school is parting ways with former head coach Craig Smith, effective immediately.
While the search for Utah’s next head coach is underway — former Utes Alex Jensen and Andre Miller are intriguing potential candidates — the team still has four regular-season games, plus the Big 12 tournament, remaining.
After Utah parted ways with Smith, athletic director Mark Harlan announced that assistant coach Josh Eilert, in his first season with Utah, will be the school’s interim coach as the Utes finish out the season.
It’s not a unique position for Eilert to find himself in. The longtime West Virginia staffer, who spent 17 seasons in Morgantown, was named the Mountaineers’ interim coach last season after head coach Bob Huggins resigned from his post. Eliert finished that season with a 9-23 record and a 4-14 mark in Big 12 play.
The 44-year-old Kansas native will attempt to regroup a locker room that could be reeling from losing its coach so close to the end of the season and try to close the season strong over the next four games.
In his second stint as an interim head coach, Eliert has a limited time to make a mark, and he has a tough debut — Wednesday at No. 22 Arizona.
“It’s tough. I feel for them and I feel for the players, I feel for the coach, I feel for his family,” Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd said Tuesday afternoon.
Lloyd, who is in his fourth season at the helm of Arizona, disagreed with the timing of Smith’s firing, calling the former Utah coach a “good man and a good coach.”
“I’m not an administrator. I don’t know why it makes sense to make a move in-season. I mean to me, it’s just like what does that say to the kids? What does that say to your fan base? What does that say to the coaching staff? But again, people make decisions for whatever reason and I don’t need to be wasting my energy speculating on why or whatever they’re doing,” Lloyd said.
With such a quick turnaround from Smith’s dismissal on Monday afternoon to Utah’s game on Wednesday night, there’s not going to be a lot of time for Eliert to put his own spin on the game plan, and he will likely roll with what Smith had already prepared. That’s what Lloyd is expecting, too.
“I don’t think they’ve had a lot of time to react. I mean I’m assuming, it just happened yesterday. I’m assuming they might’ve taken the day off coming back from Central Florida. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe they practiced. Maybe they’ve put in an entire new offense, an entire new defense in 24 hours. And if they did, good for them,” Lloyd said.
For Arizona, the week’s events in Salt Lake City doesn’t change how it is preparing for Utah.
“Utah is a good team. They have incredible size and length. … So they have obviously great size and they have positional length. They’re sound defensively. They’re not doing anything crazy. They’re really packing it in and making you play over size and length consistently offensively,” Lloyd said.
“This (Gabe) Madsen kid’s been around for a minute and he just is an incredible high-energy player and can shoot high degree of difficulty shots and get hot and make some of ‘em. And so he’s hard to guard and they do a good job playing in their concepts, kind of what we would call kind of some delay actions and where they’re kind of getting some five out and some flare screens, pin downs and just do a really good job kind of flowing and playing good basketball.”
Dating back to the Utes’ time in the Pac-12, the Wildcats were always a hump the Utes could not constantly get over. Utah has won just one of the last five meetings between the two schools, with its last victory coming in 2022, when the Utes raced out to a 42-25 halftime lead over the then-No. 4 Wildcats. In that game, Utah held Arizona to just 14% shooting from 3 and 35% shooting overall in an 81-66 victory.
Utah has only won at McKale Center, which opened in Tucson in 1973, a handful of times, with the most recent victory coming in 1986. The Wildcats will be extra hungry for a win after suffering just their third home loss of the season in a 96-95 loss to BYU that featured a controversial ending. The loss to the Cougars was Arizona’s third in four games, a stretch that also included defeats at the hands of Kansas State and Houston.
Arizona is led by Caleb Love, who is averaging 16.2 points per game but has struggled with consistency this season. Against the Cougars, however, the senior guard was back to his superstar potential, scoring 27 points on 43.8% shooting, dishing out five assists and grabbing three rebounds. Alongside Love, guard KJ Lewis (10.5 points per game) has been impactful as of late, scoring in double digits in four of his last five games.
