Johnson Gets Second Shot at San Jose

Phil Johnson realizes that second chances for college basketball coaches are as rare as huge crowds at San Jose State games.

He plans on getting both this fall.

Three years after leaving San Jose State to be an assistant coach with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, Johnson returned Monday for a second term as the school’s men’s basketball coach.

He quickly filled the vacancy left by Steve Barnes, who resigned earlier in the day to become the associate head coach at Iowa State.

The Spartans went 12-16 in Johnson’s first and only season in charge, but made major strides toward turning around a perennially moribund program. After three miserable seasons with the lowly Bulls, he hopes to finish what he started in California.

“For three years, I sat up in that office [at Chicago] and thought that there were a lot of things left undone at San Jose State,” said Johnson, a top assistant to Lute Olson during Arizona’s national title run in 1997. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about San Jose State.”

Barnes was 39-51 in three seasons at San Jose State.