For the 20 years that Tom Burman has served as a college athletic director, at Portland State and now Wyoming, he’s presided over dozens of coaching searches. But he’s never seen one quite like the last.
For starters, his search last week for a men’s basketball coach didn’t include handshakes. He also didn’t involve a search firm like he usually would, and he didn’t meet candidates at one discreet location, instead traveling to them. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, another man was conducting his own coaching search. Loyola Marymount athletic director Craig Pintens was on a plane en route to scout a candidate coaching in a conference tournament when he learned that said tournament was canceled.