University of Colorado athletic director Mike Bohn should tell Ricardo Patton he is through coaching the Buffaloes. Immediately. Have someone else (anyone else) coach the Buffs, most likely on an interim basis, for the rest of the season. Use the two-week break between CU’s 72-69 loss to Colorado State on Saturday and the Dec. 23 game against California-Davis as the transitional period.
If that’s a bandwagon, I’ve climbed back aboard.
Patton should exit the head- coaching position the way he entered it: in the middle of a season. This seems to be forgotten, but he was promoted on an interim basis to succeed the beleaguered Joe Harrington on Jan. 16, 1996, and was named the permanent choice before that season’s league tournament.
Originally, I believed Bohn should have acted soon after Patton said in October he wouldn’t seek or accept a contract extension. His was a moot gesture, akin to the producers of the lowest-rated prime-time show on network television announcing they wouldn’t seek a renewal notice for another season. It also amounted to a one-finger or two-word salute to his employers, far more so than it was a selfless deflection of pressure from his players.
But Bohn allowed Patton to stay. Or, perhaps more accurate, made him stay and accept that the losses would go on his record – and résumé. I didn’t agree with that, but at least it was defensible. The departmental plan was to sigh and wince when spotting all the empty seats in the Coors Events Center; accept anything junior guard Richard Roby and a host of freshmen could accomplish as an unexpected bonus; and count down the games to the end of the season and the Patton reign.
And while that was going on, CU could look ahead to a new beginning with a coach who won’t turn off or drive away too many players with an approach that too often strays beyond tough-love “discipline” to bullying pettiness. Bob Knight has gotten away with worse? Sure, he has. Most of the time. He also more ruthlessly has been criticized for it, and even has been fired for it once, even as he approaches setting the all-time record for wins.
Patton has wanted it all ways: The apathy surrounding the CU program was his excuse. Yet his actions and attitudes both perpetuated and added to that apathy.
For too long, members of the Colorado media – myself included – were reluctant or even afraid to criticize Patton. Part of that has to do with inattention to CU basketball, with so much else going on, but it also was calculated avoidance of the Patton issue altogether. He hasn’t been subject to the same standards – yes, the sometimes “unfair” standards – we use in evaluating other coaches who now make much more than a tenured professor.
Patton’s nearly 11-year stay in the head-coaching job has had its positive moments, on and off the court. He’s no Bob Huggins, and that’s a good thing. Yet others have proven stepping into the gutter isn’t the only way to build, rebuild or maintain a competitive program that can fill an arena with both fans and excitement.
Now, CU and Bohn can’t accept the way this nightmare season is unfolding. The Buffs are 3-6, and one victory was an embarrassing close call against Northern Colorado’s fledgling Division I program. But it isn’t only wins and losses. It also involves the continuing unraveling of the program in a season that at least could have been a dignity-based holding pattern. Plus, the athletic department needs to show the young players who chose CU that it is committed to the attempt to make this a decent program soon; plus dispel the impression that they’re being punished for being Patton recruits, so much so that the Big 12 road trips might be made on a yellow school bus.
No, I’m not being excessively swayed by the Internet-based expressions of distaste for Patton’s work this season, or even anonymous e-mails. That’s the same stuff that in another time arrived in envelopes without return addresses, or in phone calls made with handkerchiefs over the mouthpiece.
This is what I know: The program is a mess, Patton is Captain Queeg unraveling, and what once seemed like a justifiable position – play out the string because it can’t get any worse – no longer can be defended.
It could get worse.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
