In his makeover of the Utes, Boylen can and will use any persuasive material available to him. So it was Saturday afternoon, after senior guard Johnnie Bryant scored every one of his team's five baskets in the first half and led the Utes with a season-high 22 points in a 58-36 victory over Air Force at the Huntsman Center, that Boylen declared Bryant a genuine candidate for national sixth man of the year honors.
Now all that needs to happen is for someone to invent the award.
No evidence suggests that any such honor exists nationally, although a few conferences (the Mountain West not included) offer that kind of recognition.
Just the same, Bryant will take his coach's compliment. He certainly needed some convincing that the role would benefit him after two years as a Ute starter. When the coach came to him with the idea of not starting, Bryant took it the way any basketball player would: as a demotion.
"It was tough," Bryant said. "Mentally, I was all over the place. But once I came to grips with it . . ."
The voice in my head is Jazz coach Jerry Sloan's, insisting that worrying about who starts a basketball game is "high school stuff."
Yet even in college and, yes, the NBA, there's something about the way basketball players are conditioned throughout their lives that ingrains the idea that the best players start. That's the case in every other sport, except maybe for relief pitchers in baseball, so the whole outlook is understandable.
"It would have been hard for any one of us," said Ute forward Shaun Green.
"When your heart is pure . . . and you do what's best for the team," Boylen said, "it comes back to you."
While there's no pregame introduction of No. 1, Bryant is playing basically starter's minutes, 22.3 a game. He's also enjoying something any player would embrace: practically all the shots he wants, against defenses preoccupied with center Luke Nevill.
In practice, if Bryant misses a shot, the ball goes right back to him.
"His job is to make shots," Boylen said.
The responsibility reached ridiculous levels Saturday, when Bryant checked in and went 5-for-8 from the field (all three-pointers) in the first half, while the rest of the Utes were 0-for-6. That was partly explained by Air Force's repeated fouling, but it was still a stunning statistic.
"I've never seen anything like it," Boylen said.
The Utes went two-plus minutes into the second half before Green hit a three-pointer. Green's layup a minute after that was their first two-point basket; the first field goal for Nevill, Utah's leading scorer, came via a dunk from a Bryant assist with 9:12 remaining.
Bryant finished with eight of the Utes' 16 baskets, all of which became somewhat incidental, amid Utah's defensive performance or Air Force's futility or both.
The Falcons went 11-for-35 from the field, making only three shots in the second half. They looked like the Air Force of old, before the program's remarkable resurgence of the last four years, when the Academy won easily the most Mountain West games of anybody.
It was a different story in this year's conference opener. Having scored 30 points in a respectable loss at Wake Forest last week, guard Tim Anderson was held to seven by Utah's Lawrence Borha.
For the Utes, the effort was what Boylen hopes will become their usual story, with defense carrying them until the offense comes around at some point.
After those 13 seasons as an NBA assistant coach and two years on the Michigan State bench, he has the Utes believing - Bryant, especially.
"I told coach I trusted him, because he's been around basketball enough," said Bryant, who went even further Saturday in saying if Boylen now asked him to start, he would probably say no.
That's likely a stretch, but it is fair to say that Bryant has embraced the new role. And if you get the feeling that if Boylen ends up having to buy him some kind of Sixth Man trophy, he would do it.
kkragthorpe@sltrib.com
