Transfer-U has turned dream into nightmare
Lobos coach Weir also blames early success for team’s myriad woes
ALBUQUERQUE — When you stage a fireworks show at a gas station, things are bound to blow up eventually.
That, in a sense, sums up the 2019-20 University of New Mexico men’s basketball season, one in which head coach Paul Weir took a chance on a number of high-profile Division I transfers — some with spotty records, others not so much — and tried to mold them into the kind of team that New Mexico has been craving for years.
It almost worked.
But the last five weeks have been one disaster after another, sending the program into a tailspin after a chest-bumping 13-2 start gave fans hope that this year would be different. The star center was kicked off the team. The point guard has been on indefinite suspension since before Christmas. The most valuable player threw an ill-advised party where two people got shot.
Injuries. Disciplinary measures. Arrests. A restraining order and a lawsuit. Allegations of crimes ranging from DWI to battery and attempted sexual penetration.
And those are just the bullet-point lowlights. There are plenty more, all of them gaining negative press as this season has become a nightmare unlike any other in recent memory.
“I’ve had a lot of time to obviously think about these things,” Weir said, pondering the question after Wednesday’s 28-point loss in The Pit to unbeaten San Diego State of whether or not he’s angry that poor decisions by Carlton Bragg, JJ Caldwell and JaQuan Lyle have made him question the
method he used for building his team around transfers rather than the traditional recruitment of high school kids.
“I think we all in life want simple cause-and-effect explanations,” Weir continued. “This is because of transfers, this is because of Paul Weir or this is because of a lot of different things, and those all may be true to some element of it. I don’t think they’re as black-andwhite as some people are trying to make it out to be, but right now as I’ve sat and I’ve reflected on different things my biggest reflection for me, personally, in what I would have or could have done differently is we didn’t handle winning very well.”
Think about that answer for a moment.
Weir is a thoughtful, insightful coach whose grand plan to resurrect the floundering UNM program was to take as many D-1 castoffs and free agents as he could and mold them into a team-first unit. Barely halfway though the season it appeared to be working — and then it stopped working.
At 16-7 with a month left in the regular season, UNM has been reduced to a band of role players cast into prime spots, and benchwarmers eating up key minutes in crunch time.
It led Weir to become philosophical about his team’s surroundings. Albuquerque is a small enough place for student-athletes to avoid the big city distractions, but it isn’t big enough for Lobo basketball players to exist in anonymity without every misstep being reported, every move being critiqued and hyper-analyzed.
“I think Lobo basketball players in this community are of a certain stature and status,” Weir said. “When we got to 12-2, quite frankly, this didn’t happen last year or the year before, and it didn’t when the season started; it happened when we won a lot and the celebrity status came with it.”
Lobo basketball players have always carried a certain degree of fame in these parts regardless of the team’s record. But winning, that takes the celebrity status and launches it to a higher level.
“If I look back on anything, I regret that did not take a more active approach to understand that and know that and reel that in,” Weir said. “I’ve never had a curfew in my career. I’ve never done one and never been on a team that had one, but maybe this team needed one. You know, maybe this team given how much we were winning and the stuff that came with that, I think that’s what I look back on and regret to an extent.”
As dynamic as the team could have been had it somehow avoided the landmines and continued to grow while brushing aside the temptations, the downside to all of it was the risk of taking transfers who, inevitably, come with baggage. They all came here for various reasons, some leaving nationally respected programs like Kansas, Ohio State, UConn, Pitt and Texas A&M to find refuge at UNM, a school seemingly a million miles from nowhere.
Weir is trying his best to use what’s happening now as a learning tool for himself and his players. Just days before Wednesday’s game he said everything happens for a reason, even if the reason isn’t quite so clear at the moment.
Now, just a few weeks from what will likely be an end to another disappointing season, the coach said this year’s brief flirtation with success is what ultimately proved to be its downfall. Now all that’s left is picking up the pieces and finishing strong.
“I don’t regret the kids, I don’t regret taking them,” Weir said. “I still love them, I still care for them and I’m still going to coach them, but I’m new to this community and a 12-and-whatever-theheck-and-2 basketball team we were, and I should have taken a more active approach to reeling and managing what came with that because it all came when that happened.”