Long Beach State made an improbable run to the NCAA Tournament after firing their head coach, and athletic director Bobby Smitheran now insists that the outcome was exactly what he had in mind.
Smitheran announced in a statement on March 11 that Long Beach State had agreed to a “mutual separation” with head coach Dan Monson in the wake of a five-game losing streak. Monson has been given the opportunity to finish out the season, which many expected to end sooner.
After Long Beach State fired Monson, the team proceeded to win three straight games to capture the Big West championship. That gave LBSU an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament.
Before LBSU faced Arizona in the first round of the tournament on Thursday, Smitheran said he hoped that firing Monson would give the team a spark.
“My belief and hope is that by doing what I did and the timing of it, they would play inspired, and that’s what they did,” Smitheran told The Associated Press. “I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but it worked.”
That makes absolutely no sense. It is one thing to hope bringing in a new coach inspires a team, but what exactly is Smitheran trying to claim? Is he saying that he thought LBSU players like playing for Monson so much that the coach being fired would then inspire them to play harder for Monson? In hindsight, it looks like that is what happened. But if Smitheran expected that to happen, he probably should have never fired Monson in the first place.
To his credit, Monson has had an excellent sense of humor about the extremely unusual circumstances. He joked on Wednesday that he is “working for free” and compared the situation to a “Seinfeld” episode.
Long Beach State ended up with a 15 seed. Should it somehow make a deep tournament run, one of the craziest college basketball stories of the year will get even crazier.
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