The coach has had 366 days to think about how his program on the rise crumbled around him in mid-build.
The work he’d done in his first three seasons at Oregon State looked like the beginning of one of the strongest foundations in 15 years of basketball in Corvallis.
Turned out, it was full of faults.
Oregon State became the first Pacific-10 Conference team to lose all 18 of its conference games.
Jay John, however, was only around for six. When he was fired Jan. 20, 2008, the Beavers were 6-12 on the season, and 0-6 in league.
“The biggest professional setback I’ve ever endured,” John said on Thursday, calling from Golden Bear basketball offices in Berkeley.
Only his second head coaching job in his nearly 30-year career, it would be easy for us on the outside to expect the man ultimately responsible for the Beavers’ ‘historic’ season to fade from the picture of major college basketball.
It’s also wrong.
A year and a day after his unceremonious ouster in Corvallis, John finds himself an assistant for Mike Montgomery at California, on the staff of one of the top teams in the Pac-10. It sounds like an unlikely story, but then again, few thought Oregon would go from the NCAA tournament to winless this season, too.
“In this profession, and any coach will tell you the same thing, you can’t get too high and you can’t get too low,” John said. “You can stay stuck on the stupid in the middle, you can dwell on the past or you can go forward. The options seemed to me pretty obvious.”
This week the Bears play Oregon State and Oregon in Berkeley, in a set of games that will most likely be emotional for John, an assistant at Oregon in 1984-85 and 1997-98 under then-first year coach Ernie Kent.
And it is precisely the story of the Ducks’ season so far that makes John’s story so relevant.
If he can do it, Oregon should be able to. Probably not this year. Many wonder if Kent’s good enough to make it work next season. I won’t hold my breath, but I will hold on longer knowing John’s journey.
Once named the top college basketball assistant in the nation when he worked under Lute Olson at Arizona, John helped coach the Wildcats to a national championship game in 2001 and the Beavers to eight league wins in 2004-05, an NIT appearance and the program’s first winning season in 15 years.
He knows basketball – enough to know how the Beavers’ team was too young and too inexperienced to compete last year. His plan to wean OSU off of its steady diet of junior college transfers and bring in true freshmen backfired in unprecedented fashion.
“That team last year wasn’t set up to win – not in that conference,” John said. “The freshmen in high school don’t beat the varsity.”
Listen up Oregon fans: He’s talking about your current team, too.
Playing six freshmen won’t get Oregon anywhere this season. It looks like the only way to get Oregon back to the top is to hit rock bottom this season. It hasn’t been pretty, but Ernie Kent will likely return next season.
In this business though, believe there are zero guarantees. John knows that, as well.
John is hardly a tragic figure this season.
If he was, he wouldn’t be in Cal’s film room all week finding ways for his basketball team to knock out the Ducks and Beavers. What he is, then, is someone who the most anxious Ducks could learn from. He was in the cellar last year, out of a job in fact. Now, he’s looking at an NCAA tournament appearance and Montgomery’s staff look like geniuses for the way they’ve transformed the Bears.
But when he looks at that film, little of it is pretty when it comes to either OSU or UO. When he says patience worked for him (and will for Oregon, saying “They’re talented enough to beat anybody … as time passes they’re going to be good”), he says so knowing it took nearly four months of soul-searching as a jobless coach.
Understand, then, too, that he can now talk about patience in hindsight as he’s sitting in Berkeley, and not on the sideline of a losing UO team with the $227 million Matthew Knight Arena being built across campus.
It’s all part of the transformation of Oregon into a national-caliber athletics department, one that expects to contend for Pac-10 championships.
“If you don’t produce they’ll go find someone who can,” he said. “That’s just the mindset. But that’s Ernie’s school.”
Now, that’s not a bad thing. In the 1980s, when the department was so crammed into McArthur Court’s tight spaces that turning corners became treacherous, there wasn’t even the sense Oregon could compete in the league.
Then it was about if, not when.
“There was the unspoken tone, ‘Let’s be honest, how are we going to beat people week in and week out?’” John said.
Hold on to that thought.
For John, it came down to patience, too. He was laid off until April, and did what he asks players to do after a loss: get back to basics. He’s being patient about the future, saying he would welcome another head coaching opportunity, but also can’t say enough how lucky he is to be on a winning team again as a teacher, not just a soundboard for angry fans.
You see, that’s exactly what Ernie Kent has become this season.
So much so that it’s hard to ignore, now more than ever, how that feeling from the 1980s couldn’t be more appropriate now.
[email protected]