I’m starting to loose hope for our men’s basketball team.

Hats off to Tillman. Next bball season is going to be rough without him.

I’ve been a Utah Basketball fan, and attending games since sometime in the middle 1960’s when they were still playing in the Einar Nielsen fieldhouse.

I lost hope a long time ago – somewhere around the year that Majerus left.  Then I re-gained hope, lost it, gained it again, lost it again, and most recently, bought tickets to see our Utes beat Duke in Madison Square Garden.  At that point, I thought, we as a Ute Basketball program were back.

Then I lost hope again…

Every year, we bring in a decent recruiting class, and every year the coaches develop the group into a much more competitive team than we should have expected.  Unfortunately, we attain none of what should have been our pre-season goals, and following the inevitable 3rd place finish in the PAC-12 (which it turns out is a REALLY BAD basketball conference), we congratulate ourselves on “doing better than anyone predicted”.

Now, I’m trying to regain some hope, … once again…:

 – we have a few returning underclassmen that have shown potential,

 – we have a very good recruiting class coming in each of the next two years, 

 – we have some changes in the coaching staff (which includes the return of Donnie Daniels, who was a significant contributor during the Majerus era),

But, now, a last minute/unexpected change, throws us for a loop once again!

This one is an outlier.  

Tillman was to be a star, likely, during the upcoming season.  But is leaving to take care of personal/family concerns that are MUCH more important than basketball, even UTE Basketball.

God Speed Donnie!  

You are making the right choice, and I sincerely hope that all goes as well as possible.  

I also, sincerely hope that you return to the Ute family as soon as possible.  But if not, we’ll miss you, and we understand.

In the final analysis, this change is NOT a failure of the program, coaches, or staff, but a young man making what must be a difficult decision to treat family before everything else.

The program will recover or not, the coaches will be retained or no, but this young man is doing the right thing.

This is a NOT a failure of the program, but an indication of progress of the way the coaches are leading the progam.

However – we do need to win!

As much as I love Utah basketball (my brother played for them during the tail end of the mountain west period) I’m glad I live in Lubbock right now. Texas tech reminds me of what Utah could be, very similar play style and talent. Tech is just so well coached and disciplined, I wish Utah would take a page out of their book.

You can’t really fault him for this but at the same time I kind of expected Tillman to leave. For whatever the reason this is the current state of Utah basketball and it sucks.