Ali Farokhmanesh brought Nique Clifford to Fort Collins, then made him a millionaire.
When Clifford hit the transfer portal after leaving CU, Farokmanesh, the CSU Rams assistant who’d recruited Nique when the kid was a springy teen out of the Springs, reached out instantly for a second chance.
After Nique eventually chose CSU, it was Coach Ali who helped break down No. 10’s jumper and rebuild it from the ground up.
“Power in your feet,” Farokhmanesh would remind Clifford at practice. “No swimming.”
As a Buff, Nique was a 33.8% shooter on 3s and 60.6% converter of free throws. An electric driver/dunker/slasher, he was painfully erratic from about 10 feet out and beyond.
As a Ram, Clifford became a 37.7% shooter from beyond the arc and drained 77.1 from the stripe. When he rose high on that jumper, his aim was true. CSU Nique was a three-level scorer, one of the best players dancing in the NCAA Tournament and a surefire top 20-25-ish selection in this summer’s NBA draft.
“I feel like what changed even more was, I was more intentional about what I was doing,” Clifford told me after practice earlier this month. “I’m imagining what’s going to happen in the game — I’m seeing a (defense) double-teaming me and I know which read to make, the type of shots that I’m going to get. It’s not just getting in the gym, shooting a ton of shots. It’s being just more intentional and focused.”
“Where did that come from?” I asked.
“I learned that from Coach Ali,” Clifford replied. “He helped me a lot with that. Because he made a few big shots.”
A few, yeah. You know what’s funny? How often you’d hear the same thanks, the same sentiment, unprompted, from CSU players. Clifford. Isaiah Stevens. David Roddy. Just about everybody who made you #ProudToBe in Moby over the last four or five years would drop Coach Ali’s name, to either thank him or point out how he made them better.
Don’t overthink this one, John Weber. No need to wait around, either.
The best choice to replace former CSU men’s basketball coach Niko Medved is the guy who usually sat just to Medved’s right on the home bench at Moby Arena. The guy scribbling furiously. The guy who sometimes had a pen cap in his mouth. The guy whose last name still sends a shiver up the spines of Lawrence, Kansas.
Because if you don’t hand the baton to Farokhmanesh, some other athletic director will.
On one hand, Medved’s seven-year tenure set then raised the bar. On the other, Weber’s got arguably the simplest college basketball search in history on his hands.
Who needs to hire a search firm when the perfect candidates for this gig are either Farokmanesh, CSU’s 36-year-old associate-turned-interim coach, or Steve Smiley over at UNC, just 30 miles up the road?
The latter’s been quietly making a heck of a case for a step up, too. Smiley, 43, has the head coaching experience that Ali currently lacks. As the Bears’ boss since 2020, he recruited and developed Dalton Knecht, a classic late-bloomer, and held up the standard put down by Jeff Lindner when the latter left to take the Wyoming job five years ago.
Smiley’s not Tad Boyle, but his resume features a lot of Boyle-esque data points — a local star who played at Pomona High, who won at UNC (89-71 career mark), a good dude with great local pipelines who could hit the ground running.
There’s no real wrong answer, and whichever one of the two doesn’t land in FoCo will get tapped for a better gig than the one they’ve currently got soon enough.
If I’m Weber, though, I’d give Farokhmanesh an edge on two fronts. First, a better track record of recruiting wins — Stevens, Clifford, four-star forward Jaden Steppe, three-star guard JoJo McIver over, say, Knecht. And the second would be continuity. Medved will want to take anything good that isn’t nailed down with him to Minnesota, same as any other coach who’s jumping up a level. Ali gives CSU a fighting shot to keep whatever they’ve already got and stack on top of it. With Smiley, some of this current core could very well scatter — to Minneapolis and parts unknown.
It would likely be an easier transition to Farokhmanesh, who flourished as Medved’s bag man and fixed more foundations than Chip and Joanna Gaines. Coach Ali turned Clifford around. He helped transform Roddy into a “stretch 4” at the next level. He made Stevens a more consistent shooter and a stronger, more assured finisher in the paint.
“In the summertime, we would compete to see who would get the most makes in over two-and-a-half months,” Stevens, the all-time leading scorer in CSU history, recalled to me recently. “We’d keep a tally in the locker room. We had a leaderboard (hung up), and me and Nique were competing at the top of it.”
Stevens wound up on top, holding off an improving Clifford down the stretch.
“It was really close,” Stevens continued. “And then they gave us some shirts (for winning). It was a big thing for guys to get some of these t-shirts. It said on the back, ‘Green Light Shooting Champion Of The Summer.’”
“Who made the shirts?” I wondered. “Whose idea was this?”
Stevens laughed.
“Coach Ali made them,” he replied.
Such an easy call. The easiest.
Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.
Originally Published:
