Tag Archives: Tim Miles

April 13, 2012

Colorado State makes a bet on redemption

By Dave Krieger

There’s never been any doubt that Larry Eustachy could coach.

Anybody following Big 12 Conference basketball at the turn of the century will recall the back-to-back conference championships at Iowa State featuring star players Jamaal Tinsley and Marcus Fizer. Eustachy and his upstart Cyclones came this close to the Final Four in 2000 before losing a memorable Midwest Regional final to eventual national champion Michigan State.

Of course, Big 12 fans might also remember Eustachy’s meltdown at the end of that game, a public hint of the private demons that stalked him when the games were over and the television lights had been packed away.

Four years later, after the sort of internet-fed public disgrace with which we have since become familiar — a Missouri student snapped and posted photos of a drunken Eustachy kissing college co-eds at a party after a game — he found himself starting over with a program at the University of Southern Mississippi that even basketball fans barely knew existed.

The road back, both personally and professionally, led him to Fort Collins on Thursday, where he became head coach at Colorado State, a school with a president and new athletic director dreaming of greatness.

“The Southern Miss job really interested me because of the culture,” Eustachy said on the Dave Logan Show. “There just is no basketball culture there, and I’m one who has lofty goals and thinks I can change the world. The previous coach, the coach I followed, I picked the last game that he was the coach at and I counted the people in the stands and there were like 218 of ’em. And I thought, well, here’s a perfect place to try to educate the fans, to try to build some type of tradition.”

In his first season, the Golden Eagles went 2-14 in Conference USA play, good for fourteenth in the standings. Conference USA doesn’t even have fourteen teams anymore. Eight years later, they were 25-9 overall and 11-5 in the conference, accepting their first NCAA tournament bid in twenty-one years.

“To say it was easy, it was not,” Eustachy said. “It was very difficult. We were in for a marathon, not a sprint. And we got it to a point where we were getting four or five thousand people at the game and I just thought it was time to have a new challenge.

“When this opportunity opened up, I just am in love with this region, you know? I had been at Utah State. I grew up on the beach of Southern California. I love the beach and I love the mountains. I just thought this would be a perfect place to reach other goals of mine, particularly with a program with such potential.”

The internet pictures made Eustachy more famous than he’d ever been as a successful basketball coach. Iowa State announced his departure in 2003 as a resignation, but Eustachy calls it what it was — a firing.

“It was truly the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I have the disease of alcoholism and I have no problem talking about it.

“I never understood just what it meant to have that disease and be an alcoholic. I thought that was the guy under the bridge with the paper bag. I mean, I never drank during the day. I never drank before a game. I never drank before a practice. I never drank before a meeting. I drank when the day was over. And how can I be an alcoholic if I’m National Coach of the Year, winning back-to-back Big 12 championships? But I was. But I was, is my point.

“I believe there’s somebody much more powerful than me I choose to call God guiding my life, and he dropped me to my knees and humbled me and made me reinvent myself. I know it happened for a reason. So I don’t look back. I wouldn’t change a thing. I don’t need to be at Duke. I don’t need to be at Kentucky. I need to be at a place that has a chance to win because losing’s no fun. So I’m at a perfect spot in my life and would rather be nowhere else.”

In keeping with the tone that CSU president Tony Frank and athletic director Jack Graham want to establish, the first economic incentive in Eustachy’s five-year contract rewards him if his players graduate and there are no major NCAA violations on his watch. After that come the usual incentives for winning. Asked about CSU as his next stop, the 56-year-old Eustachy responded this way:

“The next and the last, and I’ve got a contract to prove it, because if I tried to buy myself out, I’d have to take out a loan. I love the area, I love the vision of the president and the athletic director and I really think it’s been an untapped basketball program, I really do.”

Before leaving for Nebraska, former CSU coach Tim Miles left the program in much better shape than the one Eustachy found eight years ago at Southern Miss. The Rams made the NCAA tournament field this year for the first time since 2003. They went 20-12 overall, 8-6 in the Mountain West Conference. In fact, Eustachy’s Golden Eagles were the only team to beat the Rams on their home floor last season, a 79-58 thrashing in November.

“I’ve completely changed as a person, Eustachy said. “I haven’t had a drink, in a couple weeks it’ll be nine years. But the game hasn’t changed. I really think there’s just one way to play the game. I think players want parameters built around them. I think players want to be coached hard. They certainly don’t want to be belittled, and we don’t do that. What we do is we mold character and we teach them how to play the game the right way.

“We’re very demanding. We don’t believe in taking plays off. We push it up the court offensively and take the first good shot available. You’d have to ask them, but I think players love playing that way and love playing for not only me but the staff that I have.”

Not that many college coaches last long enough to amass 400 career wins, so you know Eustachy has been around just by the career 402-258 record he brings to Fort Collins. CSU gives him a chance to take an unrecognized program to the national stage. Eustachy gives CSU a chance to achieve its suddenly ambitious athletic goals. And together, they have a chance to make a public statement about the power of redemption.

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March 12, 2012

Nine years later, can a Colorado team make it out of the first round?

By Dave Krieger

The last time the men’s teams from Colorado and Colorado State both made it to college basketball’s big dance was 2003. You don’t hear much about it because both were one-and-done, eliminated in the round of 64.

Colorado was the No. 10 seed in the South region that year. The Buffaloes were dispatched by the No. 7 seed, Michigan State, 79-64. Colorado State was the No. 14 seed in the West. Duke, the No. 3 seed in the region, sent the Rams home 67-57.

So the question this year is whether either or both Colorado schools can get beyond the round of 64 and get a little taste of the Madness. Both are No. 11 seeds this year. The early line made Murray State a 3-point favorite over Colorado State and UNLV a 4 1/2-point choice over CU.

So which Colorado school has the better chance to pull the upset?

If you judge by who’s hot and who’s not, it’s CU. The Runnin’ Rebels put the runnin’ back into Nevada-Las Vegas basketball under first-year coach Dave Rice, but they started faster than they finished. After compiling a gaudy 21-3 mark out of the gate, they lost five of their last ten, including a 66-59 defeat to Colorado State in Fort Collins on Feb. 29.

By contrast, after losing three of four to finish the regular season, Colorado roared back to life in the Pac-12 tournament, winning four games in four days in Los Angeles to take the conference championship in its first Pac-12 season and earn an automatic bid to the national tournament.

The challenge for CU coach Tad Boyle will be avoiding the temptation to let UNLV dictate the pace of the game. The Rebels thrive in the open court. They love to run and gun, sharing the ball and showing off high-flying moves that may remind you of Jerry Tarkanian’s teams (Rice was a member Tarkanian’s 1990 national championship team). Unselfishness is their hallmark. They were second in the nation in assists and fourth in field goal percentage. In fact, they outran North Carolina, ranked No. 1 in the country at the time, for a 90-80 victory back in November.

On the other hand, the Rebels struggle when forced to play half-court basketball. Wisconsin took the air out of the ball in December and prevailed 62-51. New Mexico obliterated UNLV 65-45 in February.

Because they don’t like to slow it down, the Rebels are also not great at holding leads. They blew advantages over TCU and CSU down the stretch of the Mountain West Conference regular season.

Slowing it down is a challenge for the Buffs because they, too, like to run. The temptation will be even greater playing at altitude in Albuquerque, where Colorado’s high-altitude conditioning should be an advantage. Still, having lost its top four scorers from last year’s squad, this particular CU team is not that explosive. It averaged 67.6 points per game, 183rd in the nation. The Rebels’ 76.7 points-per-game average ranked 24th.

At 6-foot-7, sophomore Andre Roberson emerged as a do-everything star for the Buffaloes this season. He led them in rebounds, steals and blocks, was second in scoring and assists and is their best on-the-ball defender. If he and senior Carlon Brown continue to lead as they did in the Pac-12 tournament, and if the Buffs can resist the siren song of UNLV’s pace, they’ll have an opportunity to advance to the round of 32.

In Murray State, CSU faces a similar challenge. The Racers, as their name suggests, would love to make it a race. They averaged 74.2 points per game this season in the Ohio Valley Conference, good for 40th in the country. The Rams, at 71 points per game, were 101st.

The Racers played only two ranked teams all season — Memphis and St. Mary’s — but beat them both. Against many tournament opponents, the Racers would seem small. Their starters measure up at 6-feet, 6-1, 6-3, 6-7 and 6-7. As it happens, the Rams are even smaller, featuring a starting five that come in at 5-11, 6-2, 6-3, 6-5 and 6-6.

Tim Miles’ bunch doesn’t want to run, largely because it lacks the depth to substitute freely. So it shouldn’t be tempted to get into a track meet. The Rams excel at offensive efficiency in the half court, moving the ball, moving without the ball and getting open looks. They are fifth in the country in three-point shooting and led the Mountain West in field goal percentage. But they struggle to rebound because of their lack of size.

“We’re undersized all the time,” Miles said last week on the Dave Logan Show. “We defended pretty well in the conference. We were the third-best defensive team in league play. Now, we had some troubles earlier in the year. And we lost Pierce Hornung, who’s on the all-Mountain West defensive team, for six and a half games. He got his bell rung, a concussion, during the Stanford game when we were up 13. And we lost that game and then went 3-3 without him.

“But since then, those kids have really defended, hung around on the boards and we play offense with a good pace. What I mean by that is we don’t really fast break because we don’t have a lot of depth, but when we’re in our half court offense, it’s hard to keep up with our guys. They really run hard and cut hard and play well together.”

In short, the keys for Colorado and Colorado State are pretty similar. Both must resist the temptation to allow their games to be turned into track meets, which will be more tempting for the Buffs than the Rams. Both must defend tenaciously in the half court, rebound the ball without dominant size and execute efficiently at the offensive end.

Neither is favored, but each has an opportunity to pull off the upset by playing disciplined basketball.

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