The University of Colorado does not need a 10-point plan for improving basketball.
One big change is all the Buffaloes require.
Fire Ricardo Patton.
Do it now. Why waste time while enduring one, final lame-duck year on the coach’s contract?
Patton should have been shown the door years ago, and I bet CU athletic director Mike Bohn knows it.
Nobody loves college basketball in Colorado.
Patton, who views selling the sport with the same enthusiasm most guys reserve for taking out the garbage, has not helped win friends or influence cash donations on behalf of the Buffs.
If people had true passion for the game, Patton could never have lasted 10 full seasons on the CU bench. He has provided what best can be described as chronic mediocrity occasionally interrupted by brief interludes of Chauncey Billups brilliance or Richard Roby excitement.
Yes, Patton deserves props for recruiting Billups and Roby.
But the man cannot coach. Plain and simple.
Patton is out of his league in the Big 12 Conference, where for every legendary Bob Knight there is also a Billy Gillispie making fresh magic.
In recent days, basketball at Colorado has become front-page news for all the wrong reasons.
The allegations of bullying by Patton, failure to report a sexual-harassment allegation against his program in a timely manner and regular defections of Colorado players are excuses to dismiss the coach, not the real reason he must go.
Patton holds a Ph.D. in tough love, and I honestly believe young men unable to be on time for a CU bus departing for the airport probably do learn something of value by being left at the team hotel.
But it’s basketball that Patton does not know how to teach.
On a winter night in 1997, I recall standing under a basket in the Coors Events Center and warning Billups how two seasons of Patton’s tutelage made this tremendously talented CU guard woefully unprepared for what awaited him in the NBA. He had game, but had never been taught how to use it against the pros.
Billups fumed. He politely told me a newspaperman had no business deciding what was best for his family. And, on that point, I had to admit Billups was 100 percent correct.
He declared for the draft. Betrayed by all the ways CU coaches had failed him, Billups drifted through five NBA towns through five frustrating seasons, before finally teaching himself in the school of hard knocks.
Patton, it is reasonable to guess, might be already gone if the Colorado athletic department inherited by Bohn was not so hard-pressed for cash.
While $750,000 is a lot of dough to pay Patton to go away, how much economic sense does it make for the Buffaloes to implement a long-awaited, much-ballyhooed 10-point plan for making hoops meaningful at CU with a coach who has been part of the problem?
It might cost Colorado more to keep Patton for another contentious year than to sever ties with him pronto.
Of course, now would be a tough time to find a permanent replacement for Patton.
Don’t even think about Rick Majerus, who needs to worry about his health rather than whipping the Buffs in shape. And local hero Mike Dunlap of Metro State has waited too patiently too long for the right Division I job to jump in the mess at CU right now.
The answer to what the Buffaloes need to do is already on the CU payroll.
Let Ceal Barry coach the men’s team for a year.
What’s in it for the university? Publicity that would bring national attention for a program otherwise doomed to be ignored.
What’s in it for Barry? The chance to beat Knight or Gillispie, and be the pioneer who proves women are undeniably capable of coaching any hoops team.
What’s in it for CU players? The best season of basketball instruction many of them will ever receive.
Would giving the team to Barry for a year be a crazy, risky idea? Maybe. But consider this:
More than anything, basketball in Colorado needs buzz.
Patton’s story is tired. Nobody wants to hear more bad news.
Everybody in the state would be talking about Barry on the bench for the Buffs.
Listen to Mark Kiszla at 12:15 p.m. today on KRCN 1060 AM and the Radio Colorado Network. He can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
