Kevin Keatts was fired prior to his team’s ACC tournament run last year. Done, toast, finished, doomed, bought out. But his team made a run, and Boo Corrigan had probably the most awkward week of his life. Kevin Keatts made himself a lot of money of the span of a few weeks.
He also got as close to a fresh start as is possible at this level, and had a chance to assess both his stubbornness and his blind spots, but chose instead to do neither of these things despite unprecedented interest and investment.
The Final Four run earned Keatts at least one more year, and probably at least two. I think we all understand that. I think we all accept that. Shit, man, a Final Four? Sign me up for a good several years of whatever coach for that. I assumed throughout the run that we were getting two more years of Kevin Keatts. I’m not mad about it. If that’s the cost, that’s the cost.
But what a disaster this has been. Maybe he can find a way to reconfigure with yet another offseason’s worth of work in the transfer portal, but this is unlikely—he is clueless about what makes or breaks a modern basketball team, and isn’t super interested in learning.
This raises an important question: what’s the polite amount of time to spend in purgatory? Now, this year obviously stinks, and if we have to deal with another year of this particular brand of utterly unwatchable garbage, then we’ll do it, even if we don’t like it. Is that enough? Are we being polite enough here? Are we being too polite?
I guess I can’t really get upset about it. Let it burn my eyes, we’ll always have Phoenix.