The House On The Hill
In 2010, shortly after being hired as the men’s basketball coach at the University of Colorado Boulder, Tad Boyle went house hunting. Although Boyle’s contract paid him a base salary of $589,980 a year, the collapse of the housing market was still fresh. Boyle gave his real estate agent a number he didn’t want to go above. She pushed back: Surely the new men’s basketball coach at Colorado’s flagship public institution of higher education—one of the highest-paid state employees—could afford to splurge. “If I get my ass fired,” Boyle responded, “I don’t want to be upside-down in a house.”
Today, Boyle is considered the best basketball coach in CU history, having guided the Buffaloes to the NCAA Tournament five times in 11 seasons (it likely would have been six if COVID-19 hadn’t canceled the 2020 event). Before Boyle’s arrival, the school had qualified for March Madness only twice in the previous 41 years. “He’s doing things that I don’t know if anybody else will ever be able to do,” says Mark Turgeon, the men’s basketball coach at the University of Maryland and Boyle’s longtime friend.
Boyle, in other words, no longer has to fear the ax. That’s not to say he’s at peace, though. His reward for turning a historical afterthought into arguably the most stable program in the
