Before Sean Miller did it in 2011, the only head coach in 50 years of Pac-12 basketball to win the league championship as early as his second season was UCLA’s Larry Farmer.
How’d that work out?
A year later, Farmer was asked to leave. He was said to be too nice.
It took the Bruins five hours to hire Farmer’s replacement, Walt Hazzard, who was fired four years later.
Why? He was said to be too tough.
Talk about a tough coaching gig: Farmer and Hazzard were favored disciples of the John Wooden family.
At the time all of this went down, Mike Hopkins was part of the Mater Dei High School basketball juggernaut in nearby Orange County, California. You must assume, then, that Hopkins has long known the risks of college basketball coaching.
A few weeks from now, Hopkins will almost surely succeed Farmer and Miller as the third coach in league history — that’s 50 seasons — to win the league championship in his second year. His Huskies are 9-0 in Pac-12 play with nine games remaining; they hold a three-game lead over Arizona State, Oregon State and USC, who are all tied for second.
Hopkins is no young phenom, as was the 30-year-old Farmer when he coached UCLA to the 1982-83 league title. Hopkins turns 50 this summer, and it has taken him decades — 22 years as a Syracuse assistant — to get into position as conquering hero of the Washington Huskies.
He is a right-place, right-time coach who inherited three starters from Lorenzo Romar’s 2-16 Pac-12 team of 2016-17. Those three players — Matisse Thybulle, Noah Dickerson and David Crisp — weren’t yet good enough to save Romar’s Pac-12 coaching career, but they have become the core, possible all-conference players, of Hopkins’ suddenly-celebrated Huskies.
Who knew?
Fans hold up the face of Washington head coach Mike Hopkins before an NCAA college basketball game against UCLA, Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019, in Seattle.
The league is at decades-old depths, just as it was when Farmer coached the Bruins to a 15-3 conference record in ’82-83, taking advantage of a landscape in which seven coaches — Arizona’s Ben Lindsey, USC’s Stan Morrison, Stanford’s Tom Davis, Cal’s Dick Kuchen, ASU’s Bob Weinhauer, Oregon’s Jim Haney and Farmer himself — would ultimately be fired.
No head coach has won the Pac-12 title in Year 1, although to be exact, UCLA’s Steve Lavin coached the Bruins to the 1996-97 Pac-10 championship a few months after head coach Jim Harrick was fired and Lavin, his assistant, was appointed interim coach.
Risks?
Harrick was fired 19 months after winning the national championship for allegedly filing a fake expense account for the grand sum of $267.
Basketball coaching is a fragile existence, and Hopkins is apt to learn that next season when Crisp, Thybulle and Dickerson have exhausted their eligibility, and star sophomore forward Jaylen Nowell has (probably?) departed for the pros.
It’s a get-it-while-you-can business.
Hopkins will coach his first-ever game as a head coach at McKale Center on Thursday night, although he was on the bench as Jim Boeheim’s assistant coach in December 1995, when the Orange’s zone defense befuddled No. 3 Arizona, 79-70.
Syracuse improved to 9-0 that night. The Huskies will arrive at 9-0, becoming the first Pac-12 team ever to enter Tucson with that record. Amazingly, none of Arizona’s four teams that started 9-0 in league play — 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2017 — played at McKale with that mark. The Wildcats, however, were 9-0 when they beat Washington 112-81 in Seattle back in 1998.
Coaching is also an enjoy-it-while-you-can business.
Washington head coach Mike Hopkins.
Since Arizona entered the Pac-12 in 1978-79, the league hired 46 head coaches who have since moved on. Only two of those, Lute Olson and Mike Montgomery, coached a full career and retired on their terms. Another, USC’s George Raveling, retired in 1994 after he was seriously injured in a car wreck.
Four moved on to supposedly better jobs: UCLA’s Larry Brown to the NBA, Washington State’s Tony Bennett to Virginia, Stanford’s Trent Johnson to LSU and Cal’s Cuonzo Martin to Missouri.
All the rest, 39, were fired or forced to resign.
These are the odds that Mike Hopkins ultimately faces at Washington, which has fired all of its head coaches since Hall of Famer Marv Harshman retired in 1985. All four of those hired by the Huskies made sense at the time.
Lynn Nance, a former UW assistant, had been coach at Iowa State. Andy Russo, a winner at Louisiana Tech, followed. Bob Bender, hailed as one of the game’s top young coaches and a former Duke assistant, was next. Combined, they were 121-182 in league games, and Washington never threatened the powerful Arizona-UCLA-Stanford axis that dominated the league for 20 years.
Romar, a rising star as a young head coach at Saint Louis and Pepperdine, hit it big for six seasons in Seattle, finishing first once and second three times. Romar was ultimately betrayed by a series of transactions in which players bolted early for the NBA.
Now comes Hopkins, the man with the befuddling zone defense, whose ship has come in and is docked at the Port of Seattle.
Enjoy the cruise while you can.