Yikes! That’s the best word I can come up with to describe Glen Mason’s astonishing decision to punt the Georgia job and remain at Kansas.
Yikes!
Mason isn’t the first Kansas coach to pull an about-face, you know. Not long after the Jayhawks won the 1998 NCAA basketball championship, Larry Brown told UCLA he’d jump ship for the Bruins. Overnight, however, Brown changed his mind and remained at Kansas…although he left for the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs a month or so later.
Former Kansas State basketball coach Jack Harman pulled more or less the same surprising stunt.
Back in the 70s, Harman flew to Stillwater for a press conference announcing his appointment as head coach at Oklahoma State, flew back to Manhattan, called another press conference and announced he had made a mistake.
But those were quick recantations.
Mason waited a week, and seven days can be an eternity in such an emotional situation.
On the positive side, Mason maintains the continuity of what is unquestionably a sound program.
Yet what does Mason tell a recruit if he’s sitting in his living room and is asked: “Coach, you took the Georgia job and changed your mind. How do I know that if I come to Kansas you won’t change your mind again?”
Perhaps Mason’s response would be that everyone deserves to make a mistake, and that he would never make the same one again. Nevertheless, Mason has left a crevice for opposing recruiters to jump into.
Also on the positive side, Mason’s change of heart and Monday’s 51-30 victory over UCLA in the Aloha Bowl send Kansas into its debut season in the Big 12 Conference on a wave of momentum.
However, when Mason opted to take the Georgia job a week ago, he told a press conference in Athens he snatch it because it gave him an opportunity to coach a big-time program. That was an unfortunate remark, a real bridge-burner, and could come back to haunt him.
Kansas WAS big-time this season, but with limited resources and limited attendance KU will always have difficulty staying in the limelight consistently. Georgia hasn’t been big-time lately, but with an 85,000-seat stadium and the potential to fill it, Georgia is a sleeping giant.
Mason may have burned another bridge when he rejected an 11th-hour pitch from a group of KU boosters who offered to sweeten his package with a reported $100,000. Mason will receive that additional money now, but how excited were those boosters about leaving that money on the table after they’d been snubbed?
And what of Mason’s unwillingness to divulge why he pulled the rug on Georgia? Other than the catch-all “personal reasons,” he zippered his lip.
Mason’s reticence opens the floodgate for speculation.
Did he realize too late he couldn’t work under Vince Dooley? Mason has almost total control of the Kansas football program. At Georgia, he wouldn’t. Dooley is Georgia’s former head coach and so powerful that he didn’t even have to form a search committee for a new coach. Dooley did it all himself.
Or did Mason jump-shift because the two children from his broken marriageson Pat and daughter Chrisprefered to remain in Lawrence where their mother lives?
We don’t know. We do know Mason believed he made a mistake taking the Georgia job. Now only time will tell if he erred again by canceling his one-way ticket to Athens.
