Cal Basketball: Mike Montgomery Still Believes Travis DeCuire Should Have Been his Successor
A new podcast featuring Mike Montgomery focuses primarily on his time as a young head coach at Montana, but Monty also says Cal would be in a better place in basketball had the school followed his advice in 2014 when he retired after six seasons in Berkeley.
During an hour-long conversation as part of “Griz Greats: The Coaching Tree” series, produced by ESPN Missoula, Montgomery said Travis DeCuire, an assistant at Cal at the time and now the head coach at Montana, was his preferred successor at Cal.
“He should have been the coach at Cal,” Montgomery said, “and they wouldn’t be in the dilemma they’re in if they had done that.”
Instead, Cal hired Cuonzo Martin, who stayed three seasons before taking a job at Missouri. Wyking Jones, an assistant to Martin, was elevated to the head coaching job and suffered back-to-back eight-win seasons before being fired.
Cal was 14-18 this season — perhaps overachieving — in coach Mark Fox’s debut season. But the Bears have assembled three consecutive losing seasons for the first time since the Dick Kuchen era in the mid-1980s.
Meanwhile, DeCuire is 127-71 in six seasons at his alma mater, with three regular-season conference titles and two NCAA tournament appearances.
Montgomery got his first head coaching position at Montana in 1978-79 and spent eight seasons at Missoula. He talks in the podcast about “growing up” in that community, meeting his wife and have their two children there.
“It was a good place for me to be, for sure,” he said of his time at Missoula.
Montgomery posted a record of 154-77 at Montana but the NCAA tournament always eluded the Grizzlies.
“A series of circumstances that just broke your heart,” he said of the near misses. “It was disappointing for the kids who played for us because we were good.”
Montgomery talks about the great friends he made there with whom he remains close. Among his former players are Utah coach Larry Krystkowiak and Oregon State coach Wayne Tinkle.
Now, in his post-coaching career as a broadcaster, he enjoys checking out practice at Utah or OSU the day before calling a game.
“I’ll walk in there and watch ‘em run the same stuff we ran. It’s fun to see that stuff,” he said.
Mike Montgomery shares a moment with Larry Krystkowiak.
Photo by Kyle Terada, USA Today
Krystkowiak was a star at Montana, a three-time Big Sky Conference Player of the Year who went on to a success NBA career. “Larry was a tough guy, the kind of guy we always won with.”
Leaving for Stanford after the 1985-86 season for a no-brainer, despite his affection for Missoula.
“An opportunity to go to a place like Stanford, that just didn’t happen out of the Big Sky Conference,” he said. “I was very fortunate to get that.”
Montgomery replaced Tom Davis, who came to Stanford from Boston College but could not get the Cardinal into the NCAA tournament in four seasons. Monty said he’d applied for the same position four years earlier, and secretly believes Stanford hired him because they weren’t convinced they could have basketball success with anyone as coach.
“They’d made the decision we can't win here. Let’s just hire a guy,” he theorized. “They took a big gamble. Certainly people probably raised their eyebrows. Who is this guy?”
Of course, it worked out pretty well. Montgomery won 392 games in 18 seasons, guided his team to the NCAAs 12 times, including his final 10 seasons. And in 1998, Stanford reached the Final Four.
“Interesting thing is that wasn’t my best team. That was probably my third- or fourth-best team,” he said. “That team was a team that really fit together well.”
Monty doesn’t downplay the experience of reaching the Final Four. “It was very special,” he said. “Walking out in front of 40,000 in San Antonio, it was really something those guys will never forget.”
He left Stanford after the 2003-04 season for the Golden State Warriors, but lasted just two years. He called it a mistake.
“I kind of make the joke that I set the stage for (their recent success),” he said. “It wasn’t my finest hour. It probably didn’t fit my personality.”
After a couple years out of coaching, Montgomery came full circle, landing at Cal. He was 130-73 in six years with the Bears, earned four NCAA bids and in 2010 guided the program to its first conference championship in 50 years.
