Since we’re in still a bit of a lull today, it’s Wednesday before we play UCLA on Saturday and hoops just keeps getting uglier plus the whole Penn St. thing, I thought I’d revisit a simpler time today. Plus I just enjoy the story.
The year was 2004 and what was truly a glorious season seemed all in peril. Urban Meyer, the man who swept onto the scene, won us 22 games already in two seasons and had just busted the BCS for the first time (when it was actually hard to do so), was flirting with Notre Dame before heading off for fame, fortune and Tim Tebow plutonic man love in Gainsville. It was a difficult time in Ute ville, where we were hoping our defensive coordinator would stay with us and not head south to his alma mater, aka the devil.
Out of amusement/boredom I suppose, I made a post on Utefans.net that we had hired a new coach and I had the inside information on who it was. Now I’ve been lucky enough to make friends from time to time who tell me things before they go public but if it was something this big, in no world could I be the first person to find out about it. So why so many were somewhere between believing it and wondering if it was true sort of puzzled me. The dumber people were the one who felt the need to hunt me down and tell me I’m lying.
I made a post that Utah had just hired then Toledo coach Tom Amstutz as our new football coach. Now it was going to be part of a group of posts saying Hunstman sent the jet for him but the jet ran out of fuel a couple of times because Amstutz was so fat and so on. But I never got the chance.
Everyone was so on edge about losing Urban at the foundation of our greatness and maybe losing Kyle as well, people jumped to read the news. And I guess they told other people and so on. Soon enough so much traffic was flowing to Utefans that it was somewhere between a crawl and shutting down entirely. All wondering if the hiring of Amstutz was true.
Then Cougarboard, wondering if we did have a new coach were linking to Ute fans and posting on their own, soon Cougarboard was nearly overwhelmed as well (although back then their board used to go down far less often than Utefans did, with far more users). To top that off somehow, the Toledo message board (who’d a thunk Toledo had a message board) exploded with the topic of them losing a hometown guy who only dreamed of coaching Toledo. (My favorite post on the Toledo board was some guy who must have read about me both on Utefans and Cougarboard said, “Guys I’m reading that this poster may not be reliable.” HAHAHAHA)
So now three message boards are somewhere between barely running and down and I can’t even get back on to finish the joke. But the two best parts are yet to come.
First, every message board has guys who are in the know or at least want to believe they are. Well a few of these guys at Utefans were pissed that someone might know something before they did. After it all came out that it was a joke, three of these in the know guys couldn’t get over the fact that I had duped them and made them feel stupid and carry a grudge against me to this day. (Oddly one of them also wasn’t in the know about the Pac-12 thing either, called people who were a liar and still carries a grudge against them as well, tweet me if you want to know who).
But the best was yet to come. Gordon Monson was on sports radio in Salt Lake City. Yes THE Gordon Monson. He read the rumor on Utefans and went with it live on the air saying he had a source saying Amstutz was the next coach at Utah. His source of course, was my ass.
When Monson realized he’d been duped, he spent months belittling sports message boards and the internet as sources of information, all a reflection of his wounded pride.
In the end, all was well and Kyle became our coach. But for one brief, shining moment, I WAS KING OF THE INTERNET. MOOOOHAHAHAHAHA