Heading into his 14th season, Leon Rice’s coaching staff will look a little different.
Rice announced Thursday that director of recruiting David Moats — who joined RIce’s staff in 2017 as the director of basketball operations — has been elevated to a full-time assistant coach. The move comes after the NCAA Division I Council elected to allow five countable on-court assistant coaches earlier this month.
And now, Boise State has its five on-court assistants in Moats, Mike Burns, Tim Duryea, Roberto Bergersen and assistant to the head coach Lexus Williams.
David Moats will serve as an assistant coach for Boise State this season (Courtesy of Boise State Athletics).
“Anything we give David “Red” Moats, he does it at an A++ level so we should give him more,” said Rice. “Every job I give him — whether it was starting off sweeping the floor, well he did it better than anyone else could do it. That job moved up.
“That’s the story of everybody on our staff and you want to be able to reward guys like that. And you want to keep developing them, so there’s not a ceiling and they have to go somewhere else.”
The other coaching change was a bit more unexpected. Rice announced that Larry Eustachy — the former head coach at Idaho, Utah State, Iowa State and Colorado State — was going to be a senior advisor to the head coach, a volunteer position. Eustachy, it should be noted, was already living in Boise.
“I’ve known him since the dawn of man, it seems like,” Rice said with a chuckle. “But we got to be really good friends when he came into the Mountain West (coaching Colorado State in 2012). That’s when we became real close friends. We’d go to the conference meetings and I’d be like, ‘I want to get to know that guy. He’s really interesting and really smart.’ When I got to play against his teams, they were one of the hardest teams to guard and scout and prepare for.”
As outlined in a statement, Eustachy will have three main job duties: Serve as an advisor to the MBB coaches and staff, assist with community engagement opportunities and assist with internal and day-to-day operations.
Eustachy’s on-court resume is dazzling. A Division I head coach for 27 seasons, Eustachy racked up a 523-330 (.616) record including five trips to the NCAA Tournament and a run to the Elite Eight with Iowa State in 2000.
“We don’t need another chef,” Rice said. “We’ve got a lot of great chefs here with the veterans we have in Mike, Tim and Berto, Red and Lexus has been a great addition. You don’t want to bring someone who is going to disrupt the kitchen. You want to bring somebody who is going to make the kitchen better.”
Off-the-court, few coaches have been involved in more controversies than Eustachy. He resigned from his job at Iowa State after it was reported he did not go home with his team following a loss at Kansas State, deciding instead to go to a fraternity party in Manhattan, Kansas. Pictures also emerged of him kissing college-aged women and holding a beer at a party following a loss at Missouri.
Over a decade later, while coaching at Colorado State, a CSU internal investigation recommended Eustachy be fired after a story came out in which former players accused him of creating a culture of fear and intimidation. The Rams retained Eustachy, but a later investigation looking into much of the same accusations proved to be his downfall.
At Boise State, though, Eustachy will have minimal contact with players.
“Our staff, we’re always trying to find ways to get better,” Rice said. “It doesn’t mean we revamp a bunch of things, but there’s always things we can improve on as coaches. When you’re the head coach trying to see everything, he can point out to me some of the little things I’ve been emphasizing but maybe, ‘OK, this guy can do that.’ So he can coach me a little bit.”
