By
Ryan Finley
Arizona Daily Wildcat
For nearly 14 seasons, UA fans have grabbed their flaming torches and pitchforks at the end of the football season and complained loudly for Dick Tomey's firing.
The villagers finally reached the castle Friday night sometime around seven, when Tomey abruptly resigned following a 30-17 loss to Arizona State. Tomey said he decided to resign late in the fourth quarter when he heard his own players defending UA coaches to screaming fans.
Fast forward about 24 hours to Saturday afternoon. The UA basketball team, ranked as high as No. 1 in the nation so far this season, loses a game to unranked Purdue. The team, visibly jetlagged from a trip to Maui, Hawaii, earlier in the week, is outhustled and barnstormed by a scrappy Boilermakers team and folds in the game's final minute to lose, 72-69.
Eager to see what angry UA fans - who Tomey cited as his main reason for resigning - would say about the UA basketball team's loss, I tuned into a local radio station and listened to a post-game talk show.
As I listened, it slowly came to me: in the city of Tucson, Lute Olson can do no wrong.
Olson, whose Wildcats had lost just moments earlier, was being defended by radio callers. One fan said Lute was happy losing because it meant the team no longer had to deal with the "pressure" that comes with trying to have a perfect season.
Another fan went so far as to say that Olson probably wanted his team to lose to Purdue "to teach the Wildcats a lesson."
What? I can just see Lute's haltime pep talk now.
"Y'know boys, we need to go out there, miss some shots and play some horrible basketball. We need to lose one for the Gipper!"
Frankly, there's a double standard among coaches here at the University of Arizona. It stinks.
Tomey, who gave the program seven bowl appearances in 14 seasons, was chased out of town by fans carrying "Fire Dick" signs - fans who, darn it, couldn't understand why the Wildcats couldn't win a national title. Hell, Lute makes it look so easy!
Olson is seen as a sage by almost every UA fan, win or lose. The silver-haired coach has made Arizona into a national power as a basketball team while putting a large, state school on the map for high-school kids across the nation.
Would I have even known about the UA if I hadn't seen the Wildcats go to the Final Four when I was 15? Probably not.
Olson is responsible for a lot of UA's athletic - and financial - success. No doubt about it. See the kid across the classroom with a Nike hat on? Lute had a lot to do with that. See the national title hanging inside McKale Center? That's Lute, too.
What Arizona fans need to realize is that Tomey - and all other UA coaches - will never be Olson.
Tomey hinted Friday that he had never felt at home in Tucson, where wins were met by a skeptical public and losses served as fodder for the next "Fire Tomey" newspaper column.
And yet - the next damn day! - UA fans came out in droves to defend Olson after he loses to an unranked team. Where was that support 24 hours earlier? Fourteen years earlier?
Coach Olson is a proven winner, a Hall-of-Fame coach and, by all accounts, a stand-up guy. But he's not a saint. Tomey isn't a chump, either.
Arizona football fans have set their sights too high. Sometimes, in looking for the stars, you forget that you're still millions of miles away.
Like a man leaving his wife because she's not as pretty as a Victoria's Secret model, Arizona fans have walked out on Dick Tomey because he's not Lute Olson.
They do not realize that Tomey was a perfectly good football coach put in a bad situation, one in which he was constantly - painfully - compared to a living legend. There's only one Olson. Replacing Tomey with the head coach at Boise State or the quarterbacks coach at Washington is not going to help anything.
Tomey said Friday that he hopes that Arizona fans someday realize that what they had wasn't so bad, after all.
Maybe someday Arizona fans will realize what they have done.
