Near the end of last year’s mediocre season, Utah men’s basketball coach Craig Smith uttered a short sentence that couldn’t have been any more true had an angel from heaven hand-delivered it on a solid-gold tray.
“Hey,” Smith said, “it’s a bottom-line business.”
Whichever direction, from heaven or hell, you believe another minion, Mark Harlan, descended down from or emerged up out of in recent hours, he uttered what amounted to a shorter sentence that underscored an identical sentiment.
“Craig,” he might’ve said, “you’re fired.”
The statement actually issued by the Utah athletic director on Monday was considerably more dressed up, but it said, in so many words, the exact same thing.
“… Craig has poured his heart into building our current team,” Harlan said. “However, we have greater aspirations for our men’s basketball program, both within the Big 12 Conference and nationally, and our expectation is to regularly compete in the NCAA Tournament.”
He followed that up with … “I believe a change is needed to get us to where we want to go.”
Two notables in the preceding exchange. The first is that the Utes haven’t made it to the NCAA Tournament since 2016. The second is that Harlan is the boss who hired Smith away from Utah State a few years ago to address the first problem, and the problem rather obviously still exists.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah coach Craig Smith gathers his players during an NCAA college basketball game, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025, in Salt Lake City.
Who, then, should take the blame for the continuation of that problem … the coach who oversaw the ongoing mediocrity or the AD who hired the coach who oversaw it?
The mud flows downhill. And so does the money. Utah athletics now has muddled through handing over nearly $7 million in leftover cash to former coach Larry Krystkowiak and now more than $4 million to the freshly-fired Smith, plus all the additional perks, on account of the fact that Smith had two-plus years remaining on his deal.
Hiring the wrong coach is expensive. But so is compiling records of 11-20, 17-15, 19-14, and now this season, 15-12, 7-9 in the Big 12. Even if those overall records seem to indicate a middling rise sideways and upward, they didn’t really show enough vertical thrust to switch on the imagination of Utah basketball fans, a fan base that at least historically had been accustomed to greater success.
There was a day, those gifted with long memories will recall, when the Huntsman Center rocked and rolled with the Utes’ substantial winning, game after game, as opposed to thrashing around, waiting not so patiently for scattered moments of enthusiasm.
Recent wins at home over Kansas and Kansas State, apparently, were not enough to recapture that imagination, nor to save Smith’s job, not after the Utes lost on Sunday to UCF on the road, and now face what is bound to be a royally-blue ticked off Arizona team — coming off a difficult loss to You-Know-Who — in Tucson on Wednesday night.
Assistant coach Josh Eilert will take the Utes’ helm for the rest of the season.
The question of whether Smith eventually would have elevated Utah basketball to where Harlan believes it should be will remain unanswered. In previous stops, he did manage to lift teams to nice heights, including South Dakota and Utah State. His teams went 17-16 and 14-18 before rising to 22-12 and 26-9 with the Coyotes, and then Smith’s records in Logan were 28-7, 26-8, and 20-9, going to the Big Dance twice.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Utes head coach Craig Smith after a big play, in Big 12 basketball reacts at the buzzer, as Utah Utes defeat the Kansas State Wildcats, at the Jon M. Huntsman Center in Salt Lake City on Monday, Feb. 17, 2025.
There was no dancing in Salt Lake, though, same as it’s been for nearly two fistfuls of empty seasons.
It’s clear that Utah has done a lousy job of conjuring and utilizing enough NIL money to get the necessary talent to find a proper ascent. Who’s to blame for that? Harlan mentioned those incentives in his statement, but his words sounded a bit like a mix of political-speak and wishful thinking: “We have continued to invest in our men’s basketball program, adding staff, increasing compensation and significantly enhancing NIL opportunities with our partners for our student-athletes….”
If that is true, where are the fruits of those enhancements?
“… And our investments will only grow.”
Talking to sources around the university, the belief here is that those financial commitments will indeed grow. But they’ve either lagged behind or been foolishly wasted enough for Utah to go on languishing in a mess of mediocrity, a mess deep enough for yet another Ute basketball coach to be sent off with an unfilled contract but with pockets absolutely filled with millions and millions of dollars.
