Matt Doherty. This guy is fiery.
You remember his tiff with Chris Collins that helped keep the Duke-UNC rivalry on the frontal lobe of every college basketball fan’s mind, right? It was the almost-fight that got everyone riled up — until Gerald Henderson bloodied Tyler Hansbrough’s beak in 2005.
Well, Doherty doesn’t seem to have changed much after landing back in Division I at Southern Methodist. Or, if he has, his verbally violent relapses are becoming too common.
Earlier this season, when Memphis lost for the first time at SMU in 50 years, Dan Wolken told me that the PA announcer in SMU’s building was really almost going overboard with the imminent celebration.
Or, at the very least, the Memphis program thought it was toeing the line of going over the top.
Fast forward to the SMU-Memphis game over the weekend. Memphis won 76-63, keeping its at-large hopes in tact, and in the process we saw some more animosity between the two schools and coaches.
Angel Garcia was there, hitting 3s. Drew Barham was there, making a big steal. The Byrd brothers were there, jawing back and forth with SMU coach Matt Doherty.
“I went to a real school,” Doherty yelled at them.
“Yeah,” Bobby Byrd yelled right back. “And they fired you.”
Everyone laughed at that one. Everyone had a ball.
And there’s more.
When emotions had time to settle and Doherty spoke to a pool of reporters in the post-game presser, he was a bit more tame.
“This is a basketball town and the fans here are good,” a calmer Doherty told reporters after the game. “It’s give-and-take, and they give me a hard time, so I gave them a hard time.”
The issue is, why is Doherty behaving like this? He has to be sat down. Yes, sat down like a child. As a head coach he can’t be spouting off to the hecklers and coming off like a first-year comic that can’t hack it at the big clubs.
If there’s some jovial give and take with the fans, that’s one thing, but it seems evident when he’s insisting the banners in the building are all bogus and the entire program is basically a second-rate institution that he’s put himself into the category of loudmouth meatball fan.
For video evidence (pardon the tune that accompanies it), you can see Doherty and Pastner not exactly line up in the handshake formation after the game. Shades of Duke-UNC, indeed.
