Time to give Morrill the recognition he deserves
His handwriting is already all over USU’s basketball program, figuratively speaking.
Now it’s time to let Stew Morrill literally sign his name on the basketball court that has been the scene of 124 wins and only 11 losses.
Stew Morrill Court at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum: It has a nice ring to it. Naming the court after an exalted coach is hardly unprecedented. Oklahoma State plays its home games on the Eddie Sutton Court at Gallagher-Iba Arena, the “Madison Square Garden of the Plains.” The OK State brass made the gesture to Sutton in 2005 after the hall-of-fame coach led the Cowboys to 13 20-plus winning seasons in 16 years.
In Durham, N.C., Cameron Indoor Stadium is the site of the Coach K Court, in honor of Mike Krzyzewski. Krzyzewski has delivered three NCAA championships and a period of sustained excellence to Duke University in the 25 years he has been head basketball coach there.
Sustained excellence. If there ever was a single phrase that adequately summed up the tenure of Stew Morrill at USU, that would be it. For fans of USU’s rivals, it must be maddening. Every year it’s the same. USU loses all-conference performers and the roster seems critically depleted. Morrill makes dire predictions about the upcoming season and forecasts a middle-of-the-road type year.
Then Morrill presumably waves his magic wand over his rag-tag group of junior college transfers and rejects from other schools, molding them into a 20-win crew. You lost All-Century-Team selection Spencer Nelson? No sweat, just put more responsibility on Nate Harris’ narrow shoulders.
Harris, who shot .621 percent his senior year, graduated? Big deal. Morrill just went ahead and told juco transfer Stephen DuCharme to shoot .570 while inheriting the lion’s share of the minutes at center.
Morrill has a team composed of Big-West type athletes, a team he has repeatedly said is “not that good,” running in third place in the WAC, a game behind New Mexico State. On Saturday, the Aggies were down 22-4 in hostile territory against a good Oral Roberts team. Morrill’s boys didn’t panic.
“Set your jaw and get it done” is one of Morrill’s pet phrases, and the Aggies did exactly that in overcoming the huge deficit and clawing to a 71-65 win.
Morrill has coached USU to eight 20-win seasons in a row, failing to achieve 20 wins only once, in his first year here in 1998-99 when the Ags went 15-13. The previous record for 20-win seasons? Three in a row, from 1962 to 1964.
Only three other teams in the nation have matched USU’s production of 20-win seasons over the last eight years: Duke, Florida and Kansas. USU’s 77.4 winning percentage over the last eight years trails only Duke, Gonzaga, Kansas and Syracuse. That’s pretty rarified air.
There have been some awfully good players here who deserve a lot of credit for the sustained excellence at USU: Desmond Penigar, Mark Brown, Bernard Rock, Shawn Daniels, Tony Brown, Curtis Bobb and Troy Rolle are some of the names that come immediately to mind, but in college basketball, players come and go. The constant, the rock USU’s house is built on, is Morrill.
It’s my contention that as the Beehive State’s best basketball coach, Morrill deserves to be the first coach in Utah to stand on a court which bears his name. After the unprecedented and eerily consistent success he has brought to the university, it’s the least we could do for him.
For those of you who take issue with my assertion that Morrill is the state’s best coach and point to the job Dave Rose has done in guiding Brigham Young to a 21-ranking in the AP poll, I say shut up. You are probably the same nitwits I see on our campus wearing BYU apparel. You didn’t get accepted to the Y. The love affair is over; everyone is laughing at you.
It’s impossible to be the state’s best coach when you run a dirty program and are scared to play your in-state rivals. The RaShaun Broadus debacle illustrates once again how BYU is willing to sacrifice its supposed integrity on the altar of short-term athletic success. Furthermore, it is a chilling demonstration of the laissez-faire attitude toward performance-enhancing drugs at BYU: I mean, what if Broadus had been drunk-driving on the basketball court?
There are plenty of other programs that would probably love to steal Morrill away from this university, but there’s no need to worry. Morrill had his chance to go to the big-time when Rick Majerus’ enormous weight problem forced him to leave his post at the University of Utah.
But Morrill is a throwback to a simpler time, a time when words like trust, virtue, honor and principle meant something. He would never have been happy coaching down there, in the land of fruits and nuts. After a long career at Montana and Colorado State, Morrill knew he had found a home in Utah where he could churn out 20-win seasons and soak up the adoration of a fan base which worships the ground he treads upon.
Nearly everyone I told about my dream of seeing Morrill coach on his own court voiced nothing short of whole-hearted agreement. I have the endorsement of some of USU’s coolest dudes on this plan. All I lack is popular support; a righteous clamor is needed to light a fire under the administration so they will buy the paint necessary for my plan to move forward.
Morrill has given this university so very much. To repay him, USU needs to do more than just keep signing his paychecks.
G. Christopher Terry is a junior majoring in print journalism. Submit comments to graham@cc.usu.edu for print in a future TBTF mailbag column.