2014 College basketball coaching carousel thread...

No, it doesn't. For one thing, a lot of kids go to the UMass branches in Lowell, Boston and Dartmouth which have their own teams. For another it was I-AA football until just two years ago so who cares. In every sport besides football, the Boston schools and UMass are rivals, so it's hard for UMass to whip up enthusiasm. Last and not least, Amherst is 90 miles away from Boston. Early in his UMass days, Calipari once asked me "What do I have to do to get the Boston papers to cover all our games?" I told him, "move the campus 50 miles east." He made a face, but a couple seasons later, he started playing one weekend game a year in Worcester.

 

I just remember footage of people going nuts when they made the Final Four during the Calipari days...

Wow, the Boston papers didn't cover UMass... I did not know that... Interesting...

 

When Pitino and Calhoun were at BU/ Northeastern they got better coverage than U Mass

 

To be fair, how much coverage did UMass deserve between when Dr. J left and Calipari arrived? Didn't they go 30 years between NCAA appearances?

 

They were terrible for two decades. But all of college basketball in these parts has the same problem. It's called the Celtics. College basketball was great in Boston in the early and mid-80s. BC had Gary Williams, Northeastern Jim Calhoun and BU even had Rick Pitino for a couple years. However, the Celtics had Larry Bird, so college basketball was like a cult thing.

 

I covered a few women's hoops games where the Globe had a writer traveling with UConn. I don't know if that was the norm back in the late 1990s, but these were bigger games, so maybe it wasn't a regular thing...

 

Bzdelik out at Wake Forest.

 

No surprise ...

 

It was a strange hire at the time. I know he'd coached in the NBA and had some success at Air Force, but had three straight losing seasons at Colorado before he was hired.

 

No argument. He had won at Air Force - no small feat - but he was hovering around .500 in Boulder when he got the call from his good friend Ron Wellman.

 

My junior year, Pitino landed us on the Globe Sports P1 with a postgame rant after a loss to Niagara before about 400 in a key ECAC North Atlantic game at Case Center (AKA The Roof, above Walter Brown Arena; BU still played some league games there before joining the Patriot League this year. "I'm sick of playing before CYO crowds." Well, he won the conference tournament thatyear and punched his ticket out.

 

Pitino used to slide fliers under the doors of dorm rooms to try and drum up attendance at BU.