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Larry Brown thinks only about Larry Brown as he leaves SMU

At least Larry Brown didn’t schedule a news conference.

On the day after a horrific assassination of five police officers and the wounding of several others in Dallas, news leaked to CBS Sports that the basketball coach at Southern Methodist University was retiring. Brown later confirmed that to ESPN.

SMU’s campus is about five miles from where the shootings took place Thursday night. Even by college coaching standards, where the world outside the gym is so often ignored, this was an astonishing display of myopia.

There are slightly bigger issues in Dallas today than a 75-year-old basketball coach calling it quits. Know your place, Larry. The news cycle on this day isn’t it.

But Brown never has been good at leaving. Despite having a lot of practice at it.

SMU was Brown’s 13th head-coaching position, 10 in the pros and three in college. Almost all of those tenures were successful on the court. And almost all of them ended abruptly, acrimoniously and/or controversially.

With Brown, there is no such thing as a happy ending and a warm send-off.

Three times in his NBA coaching career, Brown resigned during a season – in 1979 with the Denver Nuggets, ’83 with the Nets and 2011 with Charlotte. One time he was fired in-season – 1992 with the Spurs.

And all three times in his college coaching career, Brown has suddenly departed a program that couldn’t play by the rules during his tenure. He spent two seasons at UCLA, then hightailed back to the pros and the Bruins were placed on a postseason ban for the 1982 NCAA tournament. He won a national title at Kansas in 1988, returned to the pros immediately thereafter and let Roy Williams oversee the Jayhawks’ ‘89 postseason ban. Brown at least took the punishment himself at SMU last year, incurring a nine-game suspension and yet another postseason ban.

This latest exit from the coaching ranks – and surely to God, his last – comes amid reports of a contract dispute with the school. Brown wanted a five-year extension, and SMU reportedly wanted to give him a deal of two or three years. Which shows that Brown has few peers in basketball – in acumen and in gall.

He will be 76 in September, and expected SMU to extend him into his 80s. He just had his program harshly sanctioned by the NCAA, and frankly should have been fired for that. And when SMU says no, Brown quits one more time – this time on a day when nobody should have to think about basketball in Dallas.

The timing isn’t simply awkward for the program, which at least has a ready-made successor on staff in Tim Jankovich. It shows that Larry only thinks about Larry, and the little world inside the walls of a gymnasium. It is tone deaf and narcissistic.

(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

I understand that it can be hard to give up a lifetime of coaching, especially when you’re good at it. But at some point in time, the self-importance of some accomplished old coaches becomes disproportionate to their actual importance. They seem to succumb to their own mythology, and they often have a cadre of sycophantic enablers feeding the myth.

The Cult of the Coach remains real and powerful.

Nearly five years after Joe Paterno was fired amid perhaps the most nauseating scandal in college sports history, Penn State football lettermen advocated earlier this week for the return of the JoePa statue at Beaver Stadium. As if removing a chunk of hardware honoring a coach was the greatest injustice of the stomach-turning Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal.

Although he is a much younger and less accomplished coach than Paterno, freshly fired Baylor football coach Art Briles had the myopia militia out in force on his behalf last month in Waco. Briles was fired by the school after an independent law-firm review showed that the Baylor football program contributed significantly to a campus culture that allowed rapes and assaults to perpetuate without sufficient institutional response. Yet because Briles was a winner, the school’s board of regents was lobbied for his firing to be reduced to a one-year suspension. Mercifully, that went nowhere – but just as at Penn State it showed that a portion of the fandom believes the fired coach was the real victim in a sordid ordeal that stained the school.

And Syracuse this week hired an old Jim Boeheim friend as its new athletic director, ESPN executive John Wildhack. He might end up being a savvy hire – but Wildhack has no experience working in higher education, and some already see it as the 71-year-old Boeheim arranging the chessboard to remain as coach past his publicly declared retirement date in 2018. You might recall that Boeheim endured his second career postseason ban as the Syracuse coach in 2015 – but a lot of fans prefer to point out that he took the Orange to his fifth Final Four in ’16.

It will probably shock some of these guys when they see that their programs actually continue on without them. In fact, I can’t think of a single team that folded up and stopped playing after the departure of a legendary coach.

Florida State won a national title four years after Bobby Bowden stepped down as football coach at age 80 (and not without an administrative shove). UCLA did not deflate the basketballs after John Wooden left, nor did North Carolina after Dean Smith. Life goes on.

SMU basketball will go on without Larry Brown. Perhaps not as successfully, but that’s OK. The school did not need to handcuff itself for five years to a 75-year-old repeat rules violator – who, on a black Friday in Dallas, failed to understand his small place in the world.