All of this happened because Chris Hill started driving west on I-80 without a job in the interest of romance, because Olympus High School once chose someone else to coach the Titans’ basketball team and because he liked living in Utah so much that he never left.
Hill’s 30-plus-year tenure as the University of Utah’s athletic director will end later this spring, when he walks out of the Huntsman Center and into retirement. He’ll always believe he was an unlikely choice for his position, but that’s not the biggest improbability of his story.
In the current landscape of college athletics, nobody else ever will thrive — or even survive — in a job like this, for so long.