I have to give Bernstein credit for the rare column from him where I actually learned something.
From an article he linked detailing the demise of Boylen at Utah:
Quote:
Ute players at that time were treating Boylen's program like an exploding oil tanker, a third of the team jumping ship for destinations from Lubbock to Las Cruces and … well, dry land anywhere. Utah was coming off a 14-17 season in which it lost at home to college basketball powers such as Idaho and Seattle — which wasn't as bad as losses in the previous season to Southwest Baptist and Idaho State — and on the road to Weber State and Pepperdine. Just as bad, for the second time in Boylen's three seasons at the helm, the Utes won just seven Mountain West Conference games and lost nine.
"We need toughness," he said, as he swallowed his toast. "We need players."
What the Utes really needed was a better coach.
Quote:
The stability the Utes sought never arrived.
They were up, they were down, they were all around.
Boylen's emotions were a reflection of his uneven results — or was it the other way around? — and sometimes revealed his misplaced focus. Who can forget the coach's reaction a couple of seasons back when Wyoming scored on an alley-oop dunk in the final seconds of its eight-point win. Boylen went berserk right there on the court, confronting then-Cowboy coach Heath Schroyer, scorching into a profanity-filled tirade and still boiling days later.
He considered the dunk "classless," saying: "We'll see them again. … That's what's great about league play. But, you know, we're going to run our program with class and we're going to do it right."
Nothing said class quite like an F-bomb-filled public outburst.
Meanwhile, the Utes were sagging in the conference. It seemed as though that's what Boylen should have been more concerned with, not the shenanigans of another coach, another outfit.
But that was often his way at Utah, to hit problems over the head with a blunt object, to bludgeon them into submission. Boylen is a nice man, a good guy, a decent human being, but, as a coach, even with his enthusiasm and after all those years as an assistant in the NBA and at Michigan State, he couldn't get past the sledgehammer approach. Maybe that was born out of his football background, a game he played in high school. Jim's father was a linebacker at MSU and also a boxer, a Golden Gloves state champion, so his approach to basketball came honestly.
Still, it wasn't always the most effective way, and that also was reflected in the win-loss record.
This for me is just further evidence of him being an assclown when it comes to being a head coach whose only ideas appear to be cliches about toughness and fortitude.