At a Colorado donor event he organized Tuesday night, Tim Harrington expected the featured guest to be his normal self—fiery, intense, gregarious—but that wasn’t necessarily the case. In fact, Mel Tucker spoke at such a low pitch that the hum of a nearby mini fridge almost drowned him out. “The whole thing was surreal,” Harrington says during an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I know he knew exactly what he was doing the next day.”
Tucker’s final hours as Colorado’s head coach are becoming clearer, and while it’s not rare for college coaching transitions to have some bizarre elements, the situation that transpired this week in the Rocky Mountains is one of the strangest.