On the heels of back-to-back defeats at Washington State and Washington, as well as six straight Pacific-10 Conference losses to begin its 2008 Pac-10 schedule, Oregon State Athletic Director Bob DeCarolis gave men’s basketball coach Jay John his walking papers.
John was officially “relieved of his duties” in a Jan. 20 announcement by DeCarolis, who appointed associate head coach Kevin Mouton interim head coach.
“Our progress on the court has not been what we all had hoped for, so we are moving in a different direction,” DeCarolis said.
John accumulated a 72-97 overall record at Oregon State, 28-68 in Pac-10 play, and led the Beavers to an NIT appearance in 2005. It was the Beavers’ only postseason appearance since Gary Payton led them to an NCAA tournament berth in 1990, which also marked their last winning season before 2005.
Mouton and John’s relationship dates back to 1985. The two met during the first of John’s two one-year stints as an assistant coach for the Ducks, when Mouton was a freshman. John would leave to become head coach at Jamestown Community College in New York the following year, and Mouton followed. Mouton then transferred to the University of San Francisco for his junior season and John would follow him there a year later to coach Mouton his senior season.
Mouton graduated from USF in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and he and John would then coach together as assistants at Butler University. Their careers would follow different paths through the late 1990s, with John ending up as an assistant to Lute Olsen at Arizona and Mouton on the staff at the University of Nebraska.
The two would reunite when John took over the Beaver basketball program as head coach in 2002. Mouton spent all six years of John’s tenure as his lead assistant.
That said, it is easy to understand why Mouton is hesitant to say that wholesale changes are needed within the program that his longtime friend and mentor built.
“The foundation is there,” he said. “I don’t think it’s any great changes, it’s just shoring up the things that we’ve done and then doing them better.”
One sentiment floating around Corvallis is that John’s program had begun to spiral out of control and he had lost his players’ attention. Mouton did say that discipline is an issue for this Beaver squad.
“The things that we have to do that are different would be just concentrate on being disciplined,” he said. “Running cuts and setting screens and being able to play tough defense.”
The first action Mouton took as interim head coach was to dismiss troubled transfer C.J. Giles from the team. Giles, dismissed from the Kansas Jayhawks in November, was ineligible to play for the Beavers until early December and showed a penchant for getting himself in quick foul trouble when he finally did see the court.
Giles fouled out in just six minutes in his first game for the Beavers and fouled out of three of the five Pac-10 games he participated in. During what would be his last game as a Beaver, against Washington Jan. 19, he picked up two fouls in the first minute of play.
The next thing on the agenda for Mouton, at least in the eyes of Beaver Believers, is to get senior forward Marcel Jones back on track. Jones led the Beavers in scoring last season with 15.3 points per game, but his performance has been erratic this year. He has dropped to 10.5 points per game this season while shooting 34 percent from the field and less than 27 percent from beyond the three-point line.
“Marcel wants to win really, really bad, and it’s his senior year, so he’s really pressing and he’s making mistakes trying to do too much,” Mouton said. “He’s been really up and down … he’s still trying to do too much and I’ve told him to relax and just let the game come to him.”
Mouton said that the toughest part of coaching in the Pac-10 is the quality of coaches he has to game plan against.
“The coaching in this league is incredible, from top to bottom,” he said. “It is the strongest league, I think, in the country, and we’re just trying to find our way.”
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