Weird story from Boston College, where the new coach, Luke Murray, son of Bill, the comedian and actor, sure seems like a douchebag.
Murray, hired from the staff of the reigning and defending champion of douchebaggery, Dan Hurley, at UConn, had the athletics department at BC fire the guys who had been doing the radio broadcasts of Boston College games for the past nine years, Kevin Collins and Josh Maurer.
The reason: Murray didn’t want anybody in the program who had been part of BC’s “losing mentality” under the previous staff.
Let that sink in.
That’s bad – maniacally dumb, but also bad – and it gets worse.
Murray was hired in March; word didn’t get to Collins and Maurer that they were being sacked last week.
Meaning: good luck lining up other radio or TV gigs for the coming season.
“He’s a young head coach, no experience, and he’s being given the power to take two guys’ careers away from them who have done nothing but try to serve the program and promote the program,” Collins said in an interview with Awful Announcing.
This one hits me as a former radio and TV guy who worked for years on broadcasts of football, basketball and baseball games at VMI, where the folks treated me great.
I mean, the pay isn’t great – people assume that it is, and it just isn’t – and you’re often doing more than one job.
This was the case for Collins, who did the engineering work on the broadcasts in addition to working a decent number of road broadcasts as a solo act, when Maurer was away with his primary broadcast gig, as the play-by-play voice of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Let me let you in on a little secret there: when you’re doing the game on the air solo and doing the engineering, no bathroom breaks.
This was me when I did home broadcasts on the radio for VMI Football for seven years.
We did a 15-minute pregame show, the game – three to three and a half hours – then a 15-minute postgame show.
No potty breaks.
On top of that, your schedule is set for you for the season, and with an ACC program, that means conference road trips to Miami, to the West Coast, lots of locations in between.
The Awful Announcing article detailed the efforts that Collins and Maurer made to get a meeting with Murray, who rebuffed them at every turn – having staff tell the radio guys that he was busy with recruiting or other program activities in place of telling them himself to just bugger off.
“The reasoning that I was given was that Coach Murray basically wants a whole new fresh coat of paint on the entire program and wants no remnants of the past around the program,” Collins said. “We have nothing to do with any of that. But he wanted us removed. Didn’t feel comfortable being around a link to the past, if you will. My challenge was, well, how can he not feel comfortable around us? He hasn’t even given us the chance to meet us.”
If Murray knew when he took the job that he wanted a fresh slate, he could have told them months ago.
Instead, he douchebagged it.
I’m sure Dan Hurley is proud.
The Awful Announcing article noted that BC Athletics hasn’t yet named replacements for Collins and Maurer, but they’re looking.
Why anybody would want to work with a program run by a jerk like Luke Murray is beyond me, but two somebodies are going to do it.
No offense to those two somebodies, but I hope Murray has to direct an underling to fire them next spring, to try to get the stench of the 3-27 season that is to come for Boston College basketball off him.
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Chris Graham
