Ben Johnson was 40 and had not been a head coach when he was hired to lead the Gophers men’s basketball program in late March 2021. Johnson, a former Gophers player, was replacing Richard Pitino.
Johnson had split with Pitino as an assistant coach in 2018. Now, Pitino was being dismissed after a 6-14 Big Ten record that was his seventh losing conference season among eight at Minnesota.
Immediately, it was a long shot for Johnson to succeed, based on this:
Big-time college basketball was roaring into the new era of players being free agents in search of name, image and likeness (NIL) dollars.
And if you’re old enough to remember how the Twins handled free agency when it first arrived in full force after the 1977 season, feel free to envision Mark Coyle, the Gophers athletic director, as a younger, thinner version of Calvin Griffith.
Calvin and Coyle … they both abstained from digging for dollars.
The Gophers started from ground zero after suffering transfer mania in Johnson’s first season. They were reasonably competitive in 2023-24, Year 3 for Ben, and then most of the talent scattered for large dollars.
Only Dawson Garcia remained, and he did so almost out of charity — $350,000 up front, then another $150,000 due in the months that followed. Garcia probably could have doubled that on the open NIL market.