Boulder – Two hours before addressing the media Thursday evening, departing Colorado football coach Gary Barnett and the man who fired him, athletic director Mike Bohn, met privately with the team for 20 minutes. Barnett needed only two minutes to tell his players goodbye.
It was among the most emotional two minutes the players could remember. Many were visibly upset as they filed out of the school’s Dal Ward Center. Some refused to talk to the media.
“Not tonight,” said starting quarterback Joel Klatt, a senior who has been one of Barnett’s most vocal supporters.
Sophomore linebacker Jordon Dizon left Hawaii to play football at Colorado. The last thing he expected was needing to adjust to a new head coach.
“For someone to leave like that, it hurts down deep,” Dizon said. “He wants us to hold in our emotions. He wants us to be men about this. He said: ‘Hold your head high; we had a good year. We just had a couple of bad moments in between.’
“That’s the kind of guy he is. (But) it’s been in the newspaper for the last couple of days. For us to find out (officially) now, it’s just settling in.”
Players had hoped Barnett would coach them in the Champs Sports Bowl on Dec. 27 in Orlando, Fla., against Clemson, but Bohn said he wouldn’t.
It’s uncertain who will be the interim coach in the bowl game.
“You don’t want to lose a coach at the end of the season after what we’ve been through in the past two years,” said sophomore quarterback Bernard Jackson, referring to turmoil from a recruiting scandal and other off-the-field problems.
“Coach Barnett has been with us. He’s kind of been the rock. He’s been the backbone of the team. It’s sad to see him go.”
Junior quarterback James Cox said: “It’s so draining with everything that we’ve been through here. We feel like if we could have done better at the end of the year, he would have never been put in that situation in the first place.”
Dizon said anger among many players will dissipate next week when they begin preparing for the bowl game.
“For this team, you can’t get angry. You’ve got to move forward,” he said. “Things happen in your life, and you’ve got to go forward from it.”
Almost word for word, that’s what Barnett said in his news conference two hours later.
Staff writer Chris Dempsey contributed to this report.
Tom Kensler can be reached at 303-820-5456 or tkensler@denverpost.com.
