RIVERSIDE — Was this really necessary?

Did UC Riverside athletic director Tamica Smith Jones really have to fire the men’s basketball coach, Dennis Cutts, four days before the team’s conference opener?

Worse, did she have to do so in what apparently was such a mean-spirited fashion? According to multiple sources, all of whom requested anonymity, Jones was waiting at Cutts’ car in the parking lot after the team returned from Seattle early Sunday morning, and fired him on the spot.

Evidently, we can now add the phrase “to Lane Kiffin” to the dictionary as a verb. Cutts wasn’t fired at the airport, the way Kiffin was by USC’s Pat Haden in 2013, but the effect was pretty much the same.

Why the firing? And why at mid-season, a rarity in college athletics?

We’re still not sure.

Jones cited wins and losses in the statement released by the university Monday, when the firing was announced, citing “a need to elevate our men’s basketball program to a more consistent level, to more effectively compete with mid-major Division I programs.”

She did not elaborate Tuesday. Seen in the gym during the men’s basketball practice Tuesday afternoon, she exchanged pleasantries but declined when asked for time to talk more substantively, saying she had to be on a conference call that afternoon and then would be out of the office.

Reminded that this columnist would be writing with or without her input, she said she’d see. But multiple calls to her mobile number were greeted with the message: “The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time.”

That’s not exactly accountability. Then again, for anyone in or close to UCR’s athletic department, such a development probably isn’t surprising.

People in the program or close to it will not speak for the record, for understandable reasons: There are families to feed, and thus jobs to hold onto.

But the portrait that emerges from conversations with multiple people is that of an athletic department in a siege mentality under Jones. Morale has just about hit bottom. Staffers are getting out as quickly as they can, including resignations submitted Tuesday by the sports information director and the general manager of Highlander Sports Properties, which does marketing for UCR athletics. People have been hired for one job and then assigned two or three others, just to keep the department going.

The athletic director is not on the premises that much, most of those staffers say. And when she is, the consensus is that she’s looking out less for UCR and more for her own personal brand.

(Does this sound familiar? UCR has already experienced an athletic director who was angling for his next job before he achieved anything of note with the one in front of him. That ambition didn’t hurt him here, but it did at his next stop.)

So we will now have the traditional “national search” for a men’s basketball coach along with conjecture that the ultimate hire will be a “name,” designed to make a splash. But, then, what “name” would hitch his reputation to this program at this point?

And there is this: A money-strapped athletic operation that finds itself all but clipping coupons will now be paying Cutts not to coach through 2019-20, the final season of the extension he signed just weeks after Jones arrived in 2015. Money also will need to be found to pay whomever his replacement may be.

Meanwhile, amid the turmoil of an athletic department and the ennui of a surrounding community that hasn’t been given enough reasons to care about the city’s public university, the Highlanders have a Big West basketball season to play, beginning Wednesday night at Cal State Fullerton.

They were 5-9 in non-conference games, with a couple of big wins in the past two weeks at home against Air Force and Valparaiso — and, of course, a season-opening upset at Cal — as well as some clunkers, including slow starts in losses at Utah Valley and Seattle last weekend, Cutts’ last games as UCR coach.

But the games that count, as always in the Big West, are the ones over the next 10 weeks, culminating with the conference tournament in Anaheim in the second week of March when the Big West’s sole NCAA Tournament entrant will be decided.

“We all know as a team that firings happen,” sophomore guard Dikymbe Martin, a former North High star, said Tuesday. “It’s out of our hands. That’s in our hands is what we can accomplish that’s in front of us.

“If you get caught up thinking about that and this and the new coach and whatever happened there, your mind’s not going to be in the right place.”

Justin Bell, who played at UCR in the mid-2000s and has been on Cutts’ staff since 2012, will be the interim head coach. He said he is not looking at this as an audition, or even thinking of how this affects himself or his career.

“It’s not about me,” Bell said. “It’s about the program doing well, and it’s always been about the program doing well.

“I feel like as an alum, I have a duty to a lot of the guys who I played with and a lot of the guys who played before me to give a million dollar effort, and to the guys who were here before and to the guys who are here … Our focus is, what can we do for the program, what can we do for these guys, how can we get them as prepared as possible?”

For Bell, the only brand that matters is UCR. Some others should take note.

jalexander@scng.com

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