Three years ago, Jim Larranaga turned down his dream job at his alma mater, Providence, because he decided he had already found that job at George Mason. On Friday, he walked away from that job to a school that has been a basketball desert for most of the last 45 years.
“I think in the end, even though there were other factors, it came down to the money,” George Mason Athletic Director Tom O’Connor said Friday morning, not long after Larranaga called him to say he had accepted the coaching job at Miami. “We would have been able to pay Jim about $1 million — if all his incentives kicked in — next year. Miami was able to offer more than that in guaranteed money. I understand why he would make the move, but I think it is too bad. As far as I’m concerned, the court at the Patriot Center should have his name on it.”
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George Mason University students react to basketball coach Jim Larranaga's decision to leave for the University of Miami.
Now, Larranaga won’t be coaching at Patriot Center any more, three years after it was presumed he would finish his career at the school he took from nowhere to the Final Four. The move is a surprise to many — including Larranaga, who believed the time when he would be considered for a job in the ACC had come and gone.
“At my age, you don’t expect these opportunities to crop up,” Larranaga said in a telephone interview Friday afternoon. “You expect people to go after the hot young guys like [VCU Coach] Shaka Smart or [Richmond Coach] Chris Mooney. When my name came up, I thought I had to at least consider it.”
Larranaga’s willingness to consider leaving a school where he is an iconic figure may have had as much to do with the “other factors” O’Connor mentioned as with the money Miami offered, believed to be in the range of $1.3 million guaranteed per year for five years (Larranaga made about $700,000 in salary this past season, and only after reaching a number of incentives). It was no secret that Larranaga felt his assistant coaches needed to be paid more and was frustrated with the fact that improvements to the school’s athletic facilities were moving more slowly than he had hoped. But the biggest “other factor” may have been President Alan G. Merten’s decision to retire at the end of the 2012 school year.
Merten arrived at George Mason in July 1996, about nine months before Larranaga was hired by O’Connor to take over a basketball program that was reeling after seven straight losing seasons. Merten and Larranaga became close friends; Merten and his wife, Sally, were a constant presence at George Mason’s games.
“I was in Florida right after we lost to Ohio State [in the second round of this year’s NCAA tournament] when Dr. Merten called and said, ‘I wanted you to hear this before it shows up in the papers,’ ” Larranaga said. “That’s when he told me he was retiring next year. My first reaction was, ‘Whoa, this is a stunner.’ ”
Timing is everything in life. Twelve days after Merten announced his retirement, Frank Haith left Miami to become the coach at Missouri. Miami President Donna Shalala is extremely involved in the athletic department (reportedly, she personally fired football coach Randy Shannon last December) and was looking for a coach who had a good reputation academically as well as a good won-lost record. That’s why Harvard Coach Tommy Amaker was in the mix early. After Amaker withdrew, the choices came down to Larranaga and Wisconsin-Milwaukee Coach Rob Jeter — the sort of hot young coach (41) who Larranaga thought would be more attractive to an ACC school.
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