Cravens craving a new coaching gig

You can take the man out of coaching, but you can't ever take coaching out of the man.

So Joe Cravens, the former Weber State University men's basketball boss, watches and waits, hoping for another opportunity to step back onto the sidelines once again and do what, he says, he was "called to do" in this life: coach basketball.

Cravens was canned as the Wildcats' coach in March 2006 — with two years remaining on his contract — following a frustrating 10-17 campaign. In the fickle coaching profession, it seemed like another classic case of "What have you done for me lately?"

After all, just three years earlier, he had guided the 'Cats to an undefeated Big Sky Conference season — only the second 'Sky school to go through league play unscathed — a 26-6 overall record and a berth in the NCAA tournament. In 2003, Cravens was named the Big Sky Coach of the Year, earned a host of other district and mid-major coaching honors, and he was the toast of the town in Ogden.

"The next year, in one of those national preseason publications, it said, 'Joe Cravens has established himself as one of the best coaches in the West,'" he recalled. "I'll never forget reading that, and I thought, 'OK, I've gotten over the hump now.' I thought I'd go 10-12 more years and call it good. How quickly it all can change."

Indeed, just three seasons later, he was out of a job.

Sure, Weber State had to pay him more than $210,000 in salary for those final two years on his contract. But he was shoved out the door and away from the sidelines for the first time in more than 30 years. "The irony of my 30-year coaching career," says Cravens, 54, "is the most money I've made in coaching ... is the two years I was being paid not to coach. It's pretty amazing.

"I can't understand how a school that would complain about how much you spend on a pregame meal would fire a guy and say now we're going to have to pay him (to do nothing) for two more years."

Cravens spent seven seasons as the Wildcats' head coach, compiling a 116-88 record — more wins than any other program in the league during that span — following two seasons as a WSU assistant. He was also formerly the head coach at the University of Idaho and an assistant at the University of Utah, where he took over as interim head coach in Rick Majerus' first season with the Utes when health issues sidelined big Rick for most of he season.

"We really only had one bad year at Weber State," Cravens said. "Heck, if we would've had another year like my last year, I should've been fired. I thought I deserved a chance to get it straightened out, and that I had certainly done enough to be treated differently than how it all happened."