Upside to lackluster season: Kruger likely stays

By Ron Kantowski

Thursday, April 2, 2009 | 2 a.m.

It has taken me two weekends of March Madness, four full NIT games, two live look-ins on Jayne Appel and the Stanford women, and a double-take at the live ticker upon noticing that UTEP was playing for a championship of something, to finally come up with the silver lining in UNLV’s gray cloud of a basketball season:

Lon Kruger isn’t being linked to many coaching vacancies.

Not even by ESPN’s Andy Katz.

This is wonderful news. Now I can enjoy the Final Four and Opening Day of the baseball season without fretting about what underachieving Big Ten school might be interested in luring the Rebels’ coach off the golf course and back to the Rust Belt to teach guys with names like Krabbenhoft and Stiemsma and Bawinkel how to defend against a ball screen.

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that Kruger was linked to four Big Ten jobs — Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan and Indiana. I guess everybody back in frozen spit country remembers what a fine job he did at Illinois.

And don’t forget Arizona State — remember when he was going to coach his son Kevin down there with Bob Huggins replacing him here?

Or Missouri.

Or Kansas State (where he played and coached once before).

Or Kentucky. Not this time, but before Billy Gillispie made his poor career move.

Or Georgia.

Or the Sacramento Kings.

During the past three years Kruger has been mentioned in conjunction with all those jobs. Forget about your tax dollars, that’s your Internet at work. It’s probably a good thing the Harlem Globetrotters and Washington Generals didn’t have coaching vacancies, or he might have been linked to those, too.

Kruger was a hot commodity after guiding the Rebels to a 30-7 record and the Sweet 16 two years ago, and, to a lesser extent, was still on the front burner for a lot of openings last year, when UNLV whipped Kent State in the Big Dance and played Kansas, the eventual national champion, close for a half in Omaha, Neb.

“Forget interviews, the offers were there,” author D.J. Allen wrote in a book about Kruger that came out just before the start of the season.

Now, Kruger’s sort of back toward the burner where you leave the pizza box before you wrap the remaining slices in aluminum foil and stick ’em in the fridge.

The only job he has been mentioned in conjunction with recently is the one at Arizona, and that’s probably only because that Seth Davis guy threw something up on SportsIllustrated.com that Kruger would be an excellent fall-back choice, or something like that, if the 'Cats don't get Tim Floyd.

Tim Floyd? Really? Not Tom Izzo?

Davis said Kruger was a “sleeper” for the Wildcats’ post, mostly because he would be cheap (tell that to Nevada’s higher education regents) and because he had coached in the NBA, and that’s important to recruits, although you wouldn’t know it judging by a lot of the guys trying to pull down rebounds and make baskets here this season.

But Kruger has been denying there is anything to those rumors since like 1984. (Actually, he started denying them in October, which seems like 1984, when you consider that it’s April and UTEP and Oregon State still haven’t finished their best-of-three series in the College Basketball Invitational, whatever that is.)

It’s flattering to be mentioned as a candidate for this job or that one but it can be a nuisance, too. Kruger said he doesn’t worry about it all that much, unless somebody asks. Then he says he is happy right where he is.

“All that is a product of the times and the technology,” he said about coaching rumors at this time of the year that spread like the Conficker virus.

But because I had him on the line, I asked about Arizona again. He chuckled. He said he (still) hasn’t talked to anybody down there.