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Jim Larrañaga steps down at Miami, Bill Courtney takes over

CORAL GABLES, Fla. | Jim Larrañaga insists he still loves the University of Miami, still loves the game of basketball, still loves mentoring players, still loves coaching.

He doesn’t love what college basketball has become. And with that, he’s leaving.

The 75-year-old Larrañaga stepped down Thursday, effective immediately, and will be replaced by associate head coach Bill Courtney — one of his best friends for the past three decades — for the remainder of the season.

“I’m exhausted,” Larrañaga said. “I’ve tried every which way to keep this going.”

Larrañaga joins a long line of prominent college basketball coaches — Virginia’s Tony Bennett and Villanova’s Jay Wright among them — who have left their jobs in recent years citing the changes in the game and the challenge of coaching in the Name, Image and Likeness era of college sports.

For Larrañaga, those changes began presenting themselves when he had eight players — all of whom said they were happy at Miami — enter the transfer portal after the Hurricanes went to the Final Four in 2023.

“The opportunity to make money someplace else created a situation that you have to begin to ask yourself as a coach what is this all about,” Larrañaga said. “And the answer is it’s become professional.”

The decision by Larrañaga ends a 14-year run as coach of the Hurricanes — and, presumably, a 41-year college head-coaching career that saw him win 744 games at Miami, American International, George Mason and Bowling Green. He took Miami to the Final Four in 2023 and took George Mason to the Final Four in 2006.

The Hurricanes are 4-8 this season and only 5-19 in their last 24 games, a stunning freefall for a program that went to the Final Four just two seasons ago. Injuries and roster turnover have taken a clear toll, and Larrañaga is one of many coaches who has expressed some level of frustration with the lack of regulation and transparency that comes with NIL.

“I owe my professional career to him,” said George Washington coach Chris Caputo, a longtime Miami assistant under Larrañaga. “I learned so much and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am without him and his family. As it relates to Miami, with all respect to the people there before him, he took what was essentially an irrelevant program and turned it into a Sweet 16, Elite Eight and Final Four program. At Miami, that was unheard of. He raised the bar for basketball at the University of Miami from here on out.”

Larrañaga was under contract into 2027 and had some school officials try to get him to rethink the decision in recent days. Larrañaga said he came to the decision over the weekend, reconsidered at the school’s request, and finalized the decision Monday.

“It seems clear to me that coaching in 2024 is a much different profession than it was just a few short years ago,” Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich said.

Larrañaga is the second prominent coach to step down unexpectedly this season in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Bennett did the same at Virginia back in October, less than three weeks before the Cavaliers played their season-opener.

Bennett, when he stepped down, said NIL has simply changed the game for coaches and not in a good way.

“College athletics is not in a healthy spot. It’s not,” Bennett said in October. “And there needs to be change. It’s not going to go back. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way — that’s who I am and that’s how it was.”

Larrañaga’s decision to step aside makes him the latest big-name veteran coach to leave the ACC in recent seasons, following the departures of some other giants within the sport — North Carolina’s Roy Williams in spring 2021, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski a year later and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim to end a 47-year tenure in 2023, and Bennett earlier this year.

It’s also the second sudden retirement for Miami’s basketball programs in 2024: women’s coach Katie Meier surprised many around the Hurricanes when she stepped away this past spring after 19 seasons in Coral Gables. Meier has remained at the school as a special advisor to Radakovich and as a professor.

Larrañaga will be offered a role within the university in the coming weeks, Radakovich said.

“It’s still all about The U,” Larrañaga said.

Officially, Larrañaga’s first coaching job was in 1977 at American International. Unofficially, it was when he was a freshman at Archbishop Malloy High School in New York. Larrañaga was on an undefeated freshman team there and the coach quit at Christmas — so Jack Curran, the varsity coach there, named Larrañaga one of the student coaches for the rest of the season.

More than 60 years later, it was Larrañaga stepping down at Christmastime.

He played college basketball at Providence, has coached more than two dozen college players who went on to the NBA, made 20 postseason appearances — 11 NCAA, eight NIT and one CIT berth — as a coach, was the AP national coach of the year in 2013 and was announced earlier this month as a candidate again for enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“Coach Larrañaga is a friend of mine,” Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Thursday. “I think so highly of him. The way that he’s able to build a program that has a sense of community and we all rallied around the basketball program. I live in Coral Gables, so I’ve been part of this movement. You could just feel it the last several years. It’s been a lot of fun. He wins wherever he goes, but he does it in a way that it’s a fun brand of basketball.”

Pat Riley says the

Miami Heat will not trade Jimmy Butler

ORLANDO, Fla. | If Jimmy Butler wants a trade, the Miami Heat have no plans to make him happy.

Heat President Pat Riley — in a rare move — spoke out to address rumors Thursday, saying the team has no plans to trade Butler. It’s a clear sign that, if necessary, the team will be willing to let Butler leave as a free agent and get nothing in return.

“We usually don’t comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches,” Riley said in a release distributed by the team. “Therefore, we will make it clear — we are not trading Jimmy Butler.”

The Heat play in Orlando on Thursday. Butler did not fly with the team to Orlando on Wednesday night, and his intentions for future games seem a bit unclear as well.

Butler has not asked the Heat for a trade, but ESPN, citing sources it did not name, reported Wednesday that the six-time All-Star wants a trade by the league’s Feb. 6 deadline and is open to joining teams such as Phoenix, Golden State, Houston and Dallas.

“You have to compartmentalize in this business,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Thursday at the team’s morning shootaround in Orlando. “We want Jimmy here. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. And it’s just unfortunate that you have to control or deal with a lot of the noise on the outside.”

Butler, to be fair, has fueled some of the noise.

The primary colors of his reportedly preferred teams include orange, yellow, red and blue. Butler’s hair, perhaps not coincidentally, has been tinged in those colors at times in recent weeks.

“I actually like it,” Butler said earlier this month when asked about being linked to trade talks and speculation. “It’s good to be talked about. I don’t think there’s such a thing as bad publicity — to a point.”

Miami, if it doesn’t trade Butler, would run the risk of potentially losing him for nothing as a free agent next summer. He’s making $49 million this season and has a player option for $52 million next season.

Riley’s statement is another development in a long-running saga involving Butler’s future with the Heat, one that began picking up steam back in May when Riley was noncommittal about giving Butler an extension over the summer.

Butler is eligible for an extension that would guarantee him $113 million for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons. But he is 35 and misses, on average, about one out of every four games in his Heat tenure.

“That’s a big decision on our part to commit those kinds of resources unless you have somebody who’s going to be there and available every single night,” Riley said in May. “That’s the truth.”

Butler twisted an ankle in Miami’s loss to Oklahoma City on Friday but missed the remainder of that game and the next two Heat games — at Orlando last Saturday and against Brooklyn on Monday — with illness, not the ankle, cited as the reason.

Butler has helped Miami make the NBA Finals twice in his Heat tenure. He is averaging 18.5 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.9 assists this season.

U.S. sex-abuse watchdog fires investigator

DENVER | The U.S. Center for SafeSport abruptly fired one of its investigators last month after learning he’d been arrested for stealing money confiscated after a drug bust he was part of during his previous job as a police officer.

Jason Krasley left his job with the Allentown Police Department in Pennsylvania in 2021 and was hired by the Denver-based SafeSport center to look into sensitive cases involving sex abuse and harassment.

Among Krasley’s cases was one with Sean McDowell, who had filed a report to the center accusing a member of his Seattle-based recreational rugby club of stalking and harassment. McDowell said it took the center, which has struggled with timely handling of complaints, about eight weeks to assign an investigator to the case.

That investigator turned out to be Krasley, who stopped responding to emails from McDowell a few weeks after they first spoke. Around then, McDowell got a terse email from the center’s assistant director of investigations, Daniel Kast, who said he was “writing to advise you that Jason Krasley is no longer employed” by the center, and that a new investigator would be assigned.

McDowell did some digging and saw news reports that Krasley had been arrested and charged with theft and receiving stolen property for allegedly stealing $5,500 that had been confiscated from a drug bust in Allentown in 2019. The criminal case in Pennsylvania still has not been resolved.

“I went back and double-checked it. It was just disbelief, because I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way this could be the same guy,’” McDowell said. “I’m still struggling to wrap my mind around it because it just seems so off from what their stated mission is.”

Center has struggled to keep up with sex-abuse cases

The SafeSport Center was established in 2017 to deal with sexual-misconduct, harassment and similar cases in sports with an Olympic connection, from the elite level down to the grassroots.

At last count, it had around 77 employees on its response and resolutions team — 36 of whom are on the center’s investigations team — and the center was receiving approximately 155 reports per week. While not every report ends up as a fully investigated case, the numbers speak to an ever-growing catalogue of cases that the agency, with an annual budget of around $21 million, is tasked with resolving.

Embedded within that issue are the challenges that come with finding qualified investigators to ask delicate questions of both accusers and those accused of misconduct. The center said it hires subject-matter experts from a variety of sources including law enforcement, child protective services, Title IX, and other relevant fields.

“Although we value our relationship with law enforcement, nobody is above the law,” the center’s CEO, Ju’Riese Colon, said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.

The center said it conducts multiple interviews and a “comprehensive background check” of potential employees by an independent third party “known nationally for its work in screening and vetting candidates.” Every year, the center conducts a search for criminal and sex-offender history for active employees.

“As a CEO, I am profoundly disappointed that a former staff member has been accused of such misconduct,” Colon said. “We take this matter seriously and are assessing the situation to determine what, if any, additional vetting could have prevented this individual from being eligible for hire.”

Krasley was a detective in Pennsylvania for 20 years

Public records show Krasley worked as a detective/task force officer for the Allentown police from 2002-21. His 2024 arrest came more than five years after the alleged theft.

It came out of a May 2019 drug bust on a barbershop where police seized cocaine and $16,000 in cash.

The grand jury presentment that led to the arrest revealed Krasley was one of the officers who counted the money and was later inside the van where it was stored. Back at the station, when some of the money went missing, Krasley became argumentative and would not submit to a personal search, according to the presentment.

Krasley did not respond to emails and text messages from AP seeking comment.

What to do about cases Krasley handled?

Krasley’s arrest and dismissal from the center raises the question of what to do with the cases he handled during his time as an investigator there. The center did not provide a specific number of cases Krasley handled.

Among those whose cases were assigned to the former cop is Kirsten Hawkes, a fencer who ran into multiple frustrations with the center after reporting a claim that a former coach of hers forcibly kissed her after a meeting at a hotel bar.

Hawkes said Krasley came off as very sympathetic to her situation when they met, and “he’d sort of call me and talk about other things, like family, or other cases. We would talk for hours.”

Hawkes said she was grateful that someone was listening to her after her traumatic episode. But she also described Krasley as overly eager to resolve the case once it got to arbitration and unwilling to consider her abuse allegations against the same person from when Hawkes was a child.

When Hawkes heard that Krasley had been arrested and fired, she started wondering if her case and others were handled appropriately.

“They have the resources to call a police department and say ‘Hey we’re hiring him for a semi-government job handling sensitive information, anything we should know?’” Hawkes said. “It might not show up on a background check, but they should at least do the due diligence on digging a little bit further.

“It puts everything under a different lens, completely.”

The center said it was reviewing the cases Krasley was involved in, and currently has no indication any of them were mishandled. It is contracting with an external firm to conduct an audit of his cases.

Accuser questions if center is taking his case ‘seriously’

Since Krasley’s dismissal, McDowell, the rugby player, has had his case reassigned to a new investigator who he said “has been good” so far.

Still, the clock is ticking. The 34-year-old player says he was retaliated against and suspended by his rugby team in Seattle after he asked leaders to take action against the person he said was stalking him. The retaliation included sending details of his case to another rugby club in San Francisco, which also tried to bar him from playing.

“Because of this whole smear campaign, people are hostile to me,” McDowell said. “What the SafeSport Center doesn’t understand is, this is actually my day-to-day life. It’s not just the people I’m playing rugby with, because word spreads. And they just don’t seem to really care, or take it seriously.”

McDowell brought the case in September. Heading into the Christmas holiday, he says the SafeSport Center had not treated his case with urgency and was no further along in getting his complaint resolved than when he initiated it.

“The public-facing comments seem to be that they’re this beacon of hope and optimism,” McDowell said. “Then, every time I read a new story about them, I keep thinking, ‘The actions from SafeSport don’t align with any of this.’”

Lions sign Teddy Bridgewater as a

veteran backup QB

ALLEN PARK, Mich. | The Detroit Lions are bringing back Teddy Bridgewater to give the team a veteran backup quarterback for their playoff run.

Coach Dan Campbell said Thursday that the team signed Bridgewater as another backup with second-year player Hendon Hooker behind starter Jared Goff. The Lions have clinched a playoff spot and can earn the top seed in the NFC with two more wins.

Bridgewater was the backup in Detroit for the 2023 season when he got on the field for three snaps at the end of a blowout win over Carolina.

Bridgewater spent the fall coaching at his high school alma mater, leading Miami Northwestern High to the Florida Class 3A state title.

Bridgewater was a first-round pick by Minnesota in 2014 and has started 65 games over his NFL career. He spent two seasons in New Orleans when Campbell was an assistant on the Saints.

Hooker has played in three games this season, completing 6 of 9 passes for 62 yards.

—From AP reports