Colorado hopes to hire a replacement for men’s basketball coach Ricardo Patton before the meat market frenzy begins at the Final Four, said Tom McGrath, CU’s special assistant to athletic director Mike Bohn and the point man for the coaching search.
The Final Four starts March 31 in Atlanta. Coaches will converge on Atlanta several days before the national semifinal games in order to attend the annual coaches convention and, in some cases, look for a job.
“We want to be ahead of that a little bit,” McGrath said Monday.
Patton announced Oct. 25 that this, his 11th full season at CU, will be his last.
That gave Bohn and McGrath a four- or five-month head start on other schools that will begin their coaching searches in March after coaches are fired, resign or leave for other jobs.
During Final Four week, there sometimes can be almost as many athletic directors circulating through the lobby of the designated coaches’ hotel as there are coaches.
“We have an opportunity that we’re out in front on,” McGrath said. “We know, and everybody else knows, that our job is open. As the season winds down, there are a lot more openings that come about. From my perspective, I’d like to have (a coach hired) before the frenzy starts.
“If it doesn’t work out that way, we’re OK. But it’s certainly a reasonable objective. If we can get all our stuff done and we can go and meet with (a targeted candidate) before a whole bunch of jobs open, that would be great. You’d not be in that whole mix of competing for candidates.”
McGrath estimated the number of coaches who have expressed interest in the CU job might approach 50, although he did not have a more specific and updated figure. He would not say how many candidates he has chatted with, either personally or though an intermediary.
“I could probably get 200 coaches interested,” said McGrath, who developed numerous national contacts as a longtime staff member of USA Basketball. “What’s important is not how many people are interested in us, but how many people we are interested in.”
