Kansas City, Mo. ? The seating arrangement at Thursday’s basketball Big 12 Media Day at Sprint Center could not have worked out better. Texas A&M’s fourth-year coach Mark Turgeon sat at his table, and directly to his right was Colorado first-year coach Tad Boyle, his former right-hand man.

“I’m not sitting here without him, and he’s not sitting here without me,” Turgeon said. “To think we were at Wichita State in our third year, wondering whether we were going to make it, now we’re both Big 12 coaches.”

Boyle and Turgeon, teammates at Kansas University one year playing for Larry Brown, worked as assistant coaches on the same staff at Oregon. When Turgeon earned his first job as a head coach, Boyle joined him at Jacksonville State. Boyle followed Turgeon to Wichita State, working for him in his first six years on the job before departing for Northern Colorado, where he became a head college coach for the first time.

“I went from Tennessee, the SEC, to Jacksonville State, but I knew what (Turgeon) was about, how successful he was going to be, and I believed in him, so I went with him, we got that turned around, and we got to Wichita State,” Boyle said. “You have to get lucky. You never know where life is going to take you.”

Boyle knows that better than most. Life took him to the brink of death once. A stock broker and high school basketball coach, Boyle, then 29, was driving to work in Boulder when a motorist apparently didn’t notice the light was red, turned Boyle’s Toyota Camry into an accordion and sent him to the hospital.

“I was fortunate to be alive,” Boyle said. “That was one of those life-changing experiences you go through: ‘OK, what’s important to me? This thing could be over in a day.’ So I followed what I loved to do, my passion.”

When Turgeon called several months later to inform him of an opening at Oregon, Boyle sold his house and headed northwest to earn $16,000 a year for the next three years.

“He had all this real expensive furniture because he was making all this money as a stockbroker,” Turgeon remembered. “The furniture didn’t fit his apartment. So I used to walk in his apartment and say, ‘Here’s this $100,000 furniture in a $16,000 apartment.’ He took a huge risk.”

Boyle has a real presence about him. His first Northern Colorado team went 4-24, his fourth 25-8.

“The greatest pleasures in life come from things people say you can’t do,” Boyle said. “My thing is, there are no excuses in life: ‘We don’t have a big enough gym. Our marketing department doesn’t sell enough tickets. Our recruiting budget isn’t big enough.’ Whatever. None of that stuff matters. … You can’t make excuses. I’m not going to make excuses at Colorado, either. If I do, call me on it.”

Turgeon credits Boyle with instilling him with confidence by staying positive in the early days of his head-coaching career.

“I’m more of a negative guy,” Turgeon said. “Tad’s always a positive guy. So we were good together.”

Then Turgeon made a prediction: “He’s going to be a star.”

A very strong feeling tells me Turgeon will be proven right about that.