Larry Shyatt, You’re Doing It Wrong
From what I’ve gathered from Utah hoops fans, the only way to rebuild a basketball program is to get rid of all the old players, have one of the worst seasons in your history, scapegoat a good kid and possibly damage his future all in the name of changing the culture.
Of course, when you have a team where the kids are going to class and aren’t in trouble, why that culture needs to be changed I’m not sure. Especially when the coach has shown quite a willingness to get rid of bad apples, but I digress…
Lets take a look in at what is happening at Wyoming a school in a similar almost certainly worse position that Utah. Wyoming won 10 games last season including two double-digit defeats at the hands of the “wildly undisciplined” Runnin Utes. By any account Wyoming was in far worse shape than Utah was. It’s shocking what happened next.
Coach Shyatt didn’t run off all the players. Despite an undisciplined culture at Wyoming, Shyatt stupidly thought he could work with these guys. Then he went out and found four recruits who would actually contribute (one has since left the team, he’s Nigeria and couldn’t quite deal with Laramie) and that people would want around long term including a kid named Larry Nance Jr. (You kids Google Larry Nance, you’ll understand)
How could Shyatt be so stupid, when the obvious way to go about this is to get rid of all the previous guys, and then bring in bad JC players?
I know what you’re asking, when was Shyatt hired? He was hired three days before Larry. Maybe that’s why Shyatt started his stupid plan instead of Larry’s genius plan into action.
So what are the results you ask?
Well ol’ coach Larry and the Utes are 5-14 and thanking God that two other Pac-12 programs ran themselves into the ground. And how about the Cowboys?
Wyoming is 16-3, 2-1 in the MWC, just crushed #21 in the RPI Colorado St. and if the beat San Diego State tomorrow night, they’re going to be ranked.
Yeah that would have sucked right about now.
But please Utah fans and some of you in the Utah media, please keep telling us there was no other way for Larry to do this. Because that is REAL GENIUS.