2021 MBB coaching carousel thread

Marquette just did Texas a Jack Ruby. They saved Texas a whole lot of work.

So Texas would, in the next year, likely fire a Black basketball coach amid BLM, “The Eyes of Texas” and have fired Charlie Strong a few years ago to bring in Tom Herman.

Texas should be paying Marquette.

 

To my knowledge Arkansas has yet to extend Eric Musselman, who was hired the same cycle as Nate Oats. And Okie Light still hasn’t learned its lesson about lowballing coaches, meaning Mike Boynton could be available.

 

Someday, somebody should write a book about the last week of the Smart run at Texas -- complete with IDs of who played the rule of Ruby, Oswald, Umbrella Man and the Babuska Lady. The role of Abraham Zapruder was, of course, played by CBS.

 

Musselman is under contract through the 2024-2025 season. The only way Arkansas ponies up is if someone with a fat wallet starts kicking the tires on the Muss Bus.

 

Water finds its level, and I think Shaka Smart just found his. He goes to a school whose basketball budget is virtually the same as UT's and returns to his home state. His style will attract recruits in the region who'd rather not play in Wisconsin's structured swing offense and will make the MU-UW games fun to watch. This is definitely not a Bob Dukiet hire.

(That said, I mainly posted this to reference "Piano Bob" and one of the craziest threads this site has ever seen.)

 

Holy shit how did I miss that thread all these years? That thing went radioactive in just four pages.

 

Fun times. Haven't heard from Maryanne in a while.

 

Old Tony, disgruntled relatives, piano playing dead people, Rick Majerus, Ball State basketball...

 

Wild in respect to the fact that the story pretty much came out of nowhere and then was just a done deal. There's usually some rumblings before a move like that. This seemed to materialize out of thin air.

 

re: Smart, it's also interesting to see how VCU has been a solid program anyway since he left. I've always thought that infrastructure in college basketball is probably an underrated thing. It's probably not a coincidence that places like VCU, Xavier and Dayton - to mention a couple past and present Atlantic 10 members - always seem to be competitive despite who's in the head coaching seat. I think the last coach Dayton fired was Jim O'Brien in 1994, from a quick Google search. And, it's probably not a coincidence that Texas hasn't had great success, despite investing a ton of resources into coaches and amenities.

 

Which probably means Smart's agent initiated the contact with something like, "For $X he's yours."

 

The Texas AD might have initiated the contact with, “For $X he’s yours.”