The last time I saw Joel Cornette on a basketball court was in the finals of the 2001 Horizon League championship at Wright State. He was a sophomore at Butler University then, grown to 6-10 and the tallest player on a team that would change the way the Bulldogs thought about their basketball program. As much as anyone who wore the uniform, it was Cornette and teammates such as Rylan Hainje, Brandon Miller and LaVall Jordan who turned Butler from a nice mid-major into a burgeoning power.
Tuesday morning, Butler announced Cornette had passed away at age 35 late Monday of natural causes. Butler spokesperson John Dedman said the Cornette family was “shocked and devastated” by Joel’s passing. Cornette’s brother, Jordan, played four seasons at Notre Dame, is the school’s career blocks leader and works an analyst for the Notre Dame network as well as 120 Sports and Campus Insiders.
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It was the second death of a recent Butler star in only eight months. Former Bulldogs center Andrew Smith died in January after a long battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Joel Cornette’s basketball career lasted only a bit longer after his Butler days ended in 2003, but he coached three seasons at the University of Iowa and then, in 2011, entered the agency business with Mark Bartelstein’s Priority Sports & Entertainment company. Among the clients listed for him are Sam Dekker of the Houston Rockets, Mason Plumlee of the Portland Trail Blazers and Memphis Grizzlies draft pick Wade Baldwin.
Cornette was a four-year starter at Butler, scoring 1,102 points in his career. The Bulldogs made the NCAA Tournament three times with Cornette in the lineup, and their 2003 team made the school’s first Sweet 16 appearance — although, oddly, their best team in that period, in 2002, didn’t make the tourney because of an upset loss in the Horizon League quarterfinals.
Illinois coach John Groce was an asistant at Butler when Cornette played. “He was one of the best teammates I have coached,” Groce told SN.
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Cornette and Brandon Miller were the links between the 2001 team that propelled the program forward with its NCAA Tournament first-round destruction of Wake Forest and the team two years later that knocked off Mississippi State and Louisville before losing to top seed Oklahoma.
The most recent time I saw Joel Cornette in a basketball uniform was at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, before a Bulldogs Big East game in the 2015-16 season. There is an enormous poster of him on the wall inside the building. Cornette helped Butler become the national contender it is. And he is gone way too soon.
