PALO ALTO, Calif. — Stanford men’s basketball coach Trent Johnson has agreed in principle to an offer to become the next head basketball coach at LSU, according to multiple reports. An official announcement could come as early as Thursday.
However, Johnson had not yet told his boss, Athletic Director Bob Bowlsby, that he had taken the LSU job, according to an email from Bowlsby to the Daily Wednesday afternoon.
“LSU notified me this morning while we were on the way to the airport in Tampa that they wanted to talk to Trent,” said Bowlsby, returning from the women’s basketball national championship game. “The position probably pays twice what he makes at Stanford so I guess he feels he has to listen.”
Stanford’s players also had not heard of Johnson’s potential move to Louisiana State until reading online media reports Wednesday morning.
Ironically, the team’s annual postseason banquet is Wednesday night.
LSU, meanwhile, called a 2:15 p.m. team meeting, the LSU Reveille reported. Neither LSU players nor Stanford administrators, however, had been informed of Johnson’s hire.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Stanford Senior Associate Athletic Director Earl Koberlein told the Reveille. “I’ve just been hearing rumors on the Internet.”
The Cardinal coach, who led Stanford to a 28-8 record and a berth in the Sweet 16 this season, was named Pac-10 Coach of the Year last month.
It has been a tumultuous off-season thus far for Stanford. Johnson’s departure comes in the wake of the announcement by sophomore seven-footers Brook and Robin Lopez last week that they would forgo their final two seasons at Stanford and enter the upcoming NBA Draft.
The move also comes mere days after former Stanford coach Mike Montgomery, who is often credited with resuscitating the Cardinal basketball program, announced that he would become the next head coach at rival Cal.
Johnson leaves Stanford after four years at the Farm. He led the Cardinal to the NCAA Tournament in three of those four years. This season was his best so far; Johnson kept the Cardinal in the race for the Pac-10 title through the last weekend of the regular season and finished with a 13-5 mark in what many experts called the nation’s best conference.
Stanford was ranked as high as No. 7 in the polls during the season - its highest ranking since 2004, when it was No. 1 - and finished the year with a loss to Texas in the Sweet 16, the Cardinal’s best finish since 2001.
Interestingly, Johnson had not yet signed a contract extension. His current contract has him at Stanford through the 2008-2009 season, but highly rated coaches generally sign lucrative contract extensions well before their term expires. That Johnson had not done so had led some to speculate that Athletic Director Bob Bowlsby had little intention of retaining the coach.