SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -Eddie Sutton is coming out of retirement to replace Jessie Evans as San Francisco’s basketball coach and will have a shot at 800 wins after all.
San Francisco announced Wednesday night that Evans was taking “a leave of absence” for the rest of the season and that the 71-year-old Sutton would take over the Dons on an interim basis.
“Coach Jessie Evans has requested a leave of absence for the remainder of the basketball season,” second-year USF athletic director Debra Gore-Mann said in a statement. “I have approved his request. Eddie Sutton has agreed to serve as interim head coach, effective immediately and for the remainder of the 2007-08 season.”
Gore-Mann said she or someone from her staff would be traveling with the team regularly in the near future to “lend my support to the student-athletes and to assist interim coach Sutton in any way I can.”
Sutton’s first game will be Friday night at Weber State.
Sutton retired as Oklahoma State’s coach after the 2005-06 season. He has 798 victories in 36 seasons as a Division I coach at Creighton, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma State.
When his victories at Tulsa Central High School and the College of Southern Idaho are included, Sutton won exactly 1,000 games before retiring from coaching in May 2006.
His retirement came about three months after a drunken driving accident caused him to miss the Cowboys’ final 10 games of the 2005-06 season. Sutton pleaded no contest to misdemeanor aggravated drunken driving and two other charges following the February 2006 car accident.
Sutton reached the Final Four with Arkansas in 1978 and with Oklahoma State in 1995 and 2004. He ranks fifth on the all-time list for victories among Division I coaches, trailing Texas Tech’s Bob Knight (896), Dean Smith (North Carolina, 879), Adolph Rupp (Kentucky, 876) and Jim Phelan (Mt. St. Mary’s, Md., 830).
Evans, who had been under careful watch by Gore-Mann over the past year, was in his fourth season at USF (4-8). He was hired from Louisiana-Lafayette in April 2004 to replace fired coach Phil Mathews.
This month, the NCAA suspended Dons senior forward Vince Polakovic for 24 games stemming from his participation with a German national team in 2004.
The school said at the time that several members from the German national team received stipends deemed by the NCAA “above actual and necessary expenses.” San Francisco contended that Polakovic wasn’t among those players who received payments and said it would appeal the suspension.
Evans coached on Lute Olson’s staff at Arizona from 1988-97 and also worked as an assistant at Minnesota, Texas, Wyoming, and San Diego State before joining the Arizona staff. He helped lead the Wildcats to a 25-9 record and a national title in his ninth and final season with Arizona.
Add A Comment