joe nicholson / the associated press 2008

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In Jay John's first season as Oregon State's basketball coach, the Beavers swept UCLA and USC in Los Angeles. It was February 2003. This is not a typo.

"When we started at Oregon State, the league had Steve Lavin at UCLA, Henry Bibby at USC, Paul Graham at Washington State and Rob Evans at Arizona State," said Tucson native Kenny Carrillo, who was part of John's first OSU staff. "All of those schools changed coaches and upgraded. That made it a lot harder on Jay."

The Beavers fired John early Sunday morning, structured a buyout that will pay him $1.1 million to go away, and vowed to do their own upgrading.

OSU athletic director Bob DeCarolis muttered some nonsense about returning to "the glory days" of Beaver basketball, but that's about as likely as snowfall on Waikiki Beach.

The league is much too tough, and staying power far too tricky, for anyone to dream about a sustained period of Glory Days. Especially Oregon State.

John was fired not because he didn't fill the seats at Gill Coliseum, which haven't regularly been filled for 20 years, but because he couldn't recruit enough good players to compete with those the new coaches recruited at USC and UCLA. He was fired because he was rarely able to put enough talent on the floor to challenge the old coaches at Washington, Oregon and Cal.

"In that first year, we had a lot of positive energy, a lot of optimism going at Oregon State; there was a sense Jay could get it done," said Carrillo, a Salpointe Catholic and UA grad who grew up with John and has known him for 40 years. "Jay treats people well, he works hard and he knows basketball. He's a very smart and analytical man.

"But when you're coaching against proven winners like Ben Howland and Tim Floyd and now Herb Sendek, with all of those recruiting resources, well, that makes it a different game."

Carrillo, who has left coaching and now lives in Scottsdale, visited with his schoolboy friend when the Beavers prepared to play at Arizona State two weeks ago. Both knew that this was probably it for John, but neither suspected the Beavers would dump him midway through season No. 6.

Not that this is anything new in the coaching industry. Ten months ago, as an assistant at Southern Utah, a Division I school in Cedar City, Utah, Carrillo lost his job when veteran head coach Bill Evans was fired.

"Coaching is basically all Jay and I have ever done," said Carrillo, who was formerly the basketball coach at Mountain View High School. "It's a crazy business; at least he has been well paid."

At 49, John is young enough and skilled enough to resurface in major-college basketball, but his opportunity to be a head coach at that level has almost surely come and gone.

Further, he becomes part of the mystifying string of former Lute Olson assistants who weren't able to maintain success once they left Olson's nest.

Olson has deployed 12 full-time assistant coaches while at Arizona and the 10 who left all were fired or forced out or are close to being fired.

Jim Rosborough was fired at Northern Illinois and then awkwardly reassigned at Arizona. Tony McAndrews was dumped at Colorado State and then Arizona. Scott Thompson lost his job at Wichita State. Ken Burmeister was jettisoned at Loyola-Chicago. Phil Johnson was canned at San Jose State.

Ricky Byrdsong was encouraged to quit at Northwestern. Kevin O'Neill left Tennessee and Northwestern before getting dumped.

John joins the long and puzzling list that looks sure to grow.

Jessie Evans last month was forced to take a leave of absence at San Francisco. He is arranging a buyout. And now Rodney Tention, 29-51 in his 2 1/2 seasons at Loyola-Marymount, has entered the Job Insecurity Zone.

Carrillo's younger brother, Jerry Carrillo, head coach at Cochise College, twice an entrant in the junior college equivalent of the Final Four, sees the good in John's tenure at Oregon State.

"Jay came from the ground floor to get a job at a Pac-10 school; that's almost unheard of," Jerry Carrillo said. "Jay didn't play Division I basketball, and he started out at an assistant at a small school in upstate New York. To get as far as he got is just amazing. He gave it a good shot. He'll be OK."

In 1976, John graduated third in the Salpointe senior class of 207 students. He was an undersized football player, a lineman, who made himself into an all-city player. After beginning a career as a biology teacher, he soon figured out that he wanted to be a coach.

He's smart enough to figure his way out of this spot, too.