If the Utes are looking for the best chance to recapture the magic of the Rick Majerus years, they found it by hiring Alex Jensen. Nobody embodied the ethos of the Majerus Way more than Jensen.
Majerus took Utah to 10 NCAA Tournaments and the national championship game during his 15 years on the job and made Utah a brand name. A perfectionist, he did not dole out compliments easily. You had to see it to understand how withering his attack on players could be in practice.
But he did have a few soft spots, and one of them was Jensen. He was the coach’s pet. As noted in a 1999 column, the coach had a few of those — Craig and Mark Rydalch, Jimmy Soto, Mike Doleac and of course Jensen, among a handful of others.
Not all were stars; they were blue-collar players who did things — blocking out, setting picks, rebounding, defending — that didn’t draw public attention. They weren’t the things kids were practicing on the playground. They embodied a style of play Majerus himself employed to make the team at Marquette as a walk-on. Jensen was unselfish to a fault, the coach once noted. Majerus had to beg him to shoot the ball.
“I love Al Jensen,” Majerus would say repeatedly to reporters.
Jensen once pointed to various places on his face where he had had stitches that resulted from colliding with knees and elbows on the court — the bridge of his nose, his chin, under his left eye, his right eyebrow, several on top of his head.
“Coach doesn’t yell as much at me,” Jensen said at the time, “but in a way it means more pressure because you don’t like to disappoint him, and I’ve done that.”
It surprised no one that when Jensen retired from professional basketball, Majerus hired him as his assistant at St. Louis University, where the love affair continued. “Alex Jensen, my assistant coach, is one of my all-time favorite players,” he once said.
On Monday, the Utes came full circle when they introduced Jensen as their new head coach, and he didn’t fail to make the connection.
“The line I always say with Coach Majerus — and we joke about it — is he kind of ruins the game for you because you learn it’s hard to watch a game without picking it apart. There’s a genius to it and I was fortunate enough to play for him and start my coaching career (with him).” He also noted, “I realized today that I can’t be Coach Majerus, and I gotta find myself.”
It remains to be seen if whatever Jensen has learned as a player and a coach from Majerus and others works for him in today’s college game, which has completely changed since he left college coaching in 2011. As he noted in Monday’s press conference, “When I last stopped recruiting, they were just introducing text messages, and I thought, Oh, I’m glad I’m leaving. It’s going to get crazy … I might have to get a Twitter account or something now.”
Or some NIL money.
The Utes have advanced to the NCAA Tournament only five times during the 21 years since Majerus left the bench, the last one nine years ago. It’s been 16 years since they won a conference championship.
As a result, interest and attendance has waned — the Utes have used curtains to hide sections of empty seats at times during their long slump — and their bank account has suffered as well (it didn’t help that they had to pay out millions of dollars to coaches for years after they fired them). It also means they have attracted less NIL money, and that’s the single most important factor for success in today’s crazy college basketball world — how many superstars a school can rent for a season.
As mentioned in this column three weeks ago, according to a report in The Salt Lake Tribune, the Utes have an NIL budget of about $2 million for the current season; that’s enough to buy one quality player. It’s a vicious cycle. To attract NIL money, a team must win; to win, a team must have NIL money. Utah’s highly successful football program reportedly has $7 million per year to buy a roster.
Three years ago, the school’s football coach, Kyle Whittingham, spelled it out: “There’s going to come a time in the very, very near future where the top-25 NIL pots of money are going to mirror exactly the top-25 teams in the country.”
How would Majerus have responded to such challenges? More to the point, how will his protege respond to it?
