It's Season 6 for Hopkins and UW Basketball Isn't Getting Any Better

A West Coast college basketball coach once revealed how he needed to change jobs every five seasons, even if he was still moderately successful, or he stood a very real chance of getting fired.

It didn't matter how many games he won, but the donors invariably would get tired of him at some point, he might get a little distracted by this and his players would sense the disconnect and no longer respond to him.

Failing to heed his own advice, this coach stayed six seasons at a California school — and he was terminated, right on schedule.

After opening with a pair of successful seasons at the University of Washington by using mostly inherited players, Mike Hopkins appears to have moved into this coaching danger zone.

He's now in his sixth year in Montlake and he's lost four of his past six games by 17, 13, 13 and 25 points, the most recent a 74-49 debacle to UCLA Sunday at Alaska Airlines Arena.

This is usually how it begins when a college coach and his job begin to go in different directions, when red flags suddenly start popping up in bunches, alerting everyone nothing good will come of this.

In Hopkins' case, he's been given far more chances than the average basketball coach, if not many, many more opportunities than the typical Husky leader — seven of his eight predecessors at the UW were fired, most following a four-season trial.

This immediate UW downturn comes after Hopkins' 2021-22 team full of accomplished transfers finished an underachieving 17-15. 

That followed a harrowing 5-21 season during the height of the pandemic that proved to be the second worst in school history, for which Hopkins was incredibly lucky to have survived. 

All of this dire stuff happened after his 2019-20 Husky basketball team, built around a pair of future NBA players and eventual pro starters in Isaiah Stewart and Jaden McDaniels, wound up 15-17, after losing a most disturbing 13 of 15 contests coming down the stretch.

Late Sunday afternoon after his team wasn't competitive with UCLA, the usually personable but solemn Hopkins spoke for eight minutes and 26 seconds in his postgame news conference at Alaska Airlines Arena. He responded to a bunch of softball questions about shot selection and team chemistry.  

"You have to play hard, have to play smart and you've got to play together," Hopkins said. "I thought we played hard. I don't think we played smart and I thought, as the game went on late, we've got to play more together."

No one asked him whether his coaching was at fault? Whether his job might be question after a bunch of blowouts? Why he allowed his players to launch two dozen 3-pointers when they can't shoot? Or why they don't feed the ball to his steadily improving big man, 7-foot-1 Braxton Meah, a luxury most teams, certainly Husky teams, don't have?

Shooting errant 3-pointers vs. relying on a rare UW post presence seems like such a no-brainer

Yet Hopkins often is hoping for something that isn't there — such as players making treys when the season stats surely would tell him otherwise.

"We just have to fight and get better," the coach continued. "That's all you can do."

Hopkins should heed his own advice. For two decades, he was a trusted Syracuse assistant for overly demanding Jim Boeheim, but he's nothing like the man he also played for. 

He's Dr. Feel-Good when his Huskies need an almost ruthless surgeon to change things up, especially when things go south.

While the current Huskies are 9-6 overall (1-3 Pac-12), there were signs early on this team would struggle. It had one of the easiest non-conference schedules at the school over the past decade or more, and the UW still lost to California Baptist and struggled to beat North Florida, Utah Tech and Cal Poly. 

Against UCLA, Hopkins' team had no control over what was taking place, no influence whatsoever in the outcome, all indicators somebody should be evaluating the leadership once more.

Things are bound to get a lot worse for the Huskies before they ease up and then maybe get worse again. This team must face Arizona (13-1, 2-1) and Arizona State (11-3, 2-1) this week in the desert, hardly an antidote for a struggling college basketball program.

This team needs an offensive plan and doesn't have one. This team has a big man and doesn't use him. The coach makes people like him, but not fear him. The players seem frustrated by the UW plight, hence Noah Williams heading straight to the locker room after fouling out against the Bruins. 

The five men who coached the Huskies prior to Hopkins each were dismissed. In all but one situation, obvious signs suggested that things were greatly amiss, that certain change was needed. In the other case, the school president simply disliked the coach so much he had him removed.

If you were media and covered those previous ill-fated coaching eras, you sat through interview session after interview session in which the coach and/or the players promised they wouldn't give up, that they would turn things around, and they never did. 

Hopkins is in season six in Seattle now, with zero buzz around the program. This was troubling enough before these bad losses began showing up in bunches, only to make things worse. 

It's growing increasingly difficult for him not to get deep-sixed.

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