2022 college basketball coaching carousel of progress

Memphis. Take away the prime Calipari years (2005-09) and there hasn't been much to see there for a long time (pretty interesting that you can say the same for U-Mass.)

Maryland moving to the Big Ten saved the athletic department, financially, but eliminated all their rivalries. Maryland-UNC is an easy sell on a Wednesday night. Maryland-Nebraska with a 9 p.m. tip so it can air as the second-fiddle B1G Network game to Ohio State-Michigan or Purdue-Indiana? Who's going to that?

I'd argue that Butler is heading down the road to irrelevance, though a coaching change might help.

Wake Forest had a good stretch from about 1990 to 2005 but has been invisible since then.

DePaul, for sure. A complete non-entity for decades.

 

Have we heard from Marquette since Buzz left?

And I’ll say it: the Jamie Dixon firing (and it was a firing. Don’t kid yourselves) will do to Pitt what pushing Phil Martelli out did to St. Joes. They’ll be lucky to be a .500 program now.

 

Shaka seems to have Marquette pointed in the right direction. That hire made almost too much sense, and the early returns are promising.

Pitt is a great call. That program is a dumpster fire right now.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to Syracuse when Boeheim finally leaves. They really need to get that hire right, because playing in front of only 10,000 in that dome would be pretty striking to recruits.

St. Joe's was an interesting case with Martelli, who obviously earned a whole lot of goodwill with that magical 2003-04 team (and because he generally was well liked by everyone). But in 24 seasons, his teams made the tournament only seven times and got past the opening weekend only twice (and one of those times was Martelli's second season). Whether that's the ceiling for a program like St. Joe's I guess is debatable, but his teams finished .500 or worse in four of his final five seasons.

 

Georgetown could play at the Go-Go/Mystics arena at St. Elizabeths that seats about 4,500, but a.) it's on the other side of the city, b.) most of the legacy Big East schools are still in the big arenas and c.) it'd be viewed as a major comedown so it won't happen.

(I forgot St. Elizabeths is smaller than GW's arena, so it definitely won't happen.)

 

As a longtime Butler fan, I am anxious about that. They were still there when Chris Holtmann was coach, which gives me hope a coaching change can make a difference, but I worry the facilities and salaries arms race has out-paced their ability to keep up, even with the extra Big East revenue.

Holtmann's salary at Butler five years ago was basically middle of the pack in the Big East. Jordan's salary, which is roughly the same, is now last by a good bit.

 

When I was an SID, we played at The Pit once. It was tough. I don't know about the players, but I was huffing and puffing up the stupid ramp from the court a bunch of times. Stupid Pit.

 

Pitt basketball is gonna be a great book one day, and with this year being the 20th anniversary of the Brandin Knight team making that first sweet 16, someone in Pittsburgh media should probably be working on something but probably aren’t.

Howland wasn’t hired by Pitt as much as he was steered to them by Sonny Vaccaro. His style was perfect for a school which had no identity, played in a converted trolley barn in a city that really couldn’t care less about high school basketball. He and Jaime Dixon turned it into one of the hottest tickets in town at a time when the Penguins were floundering, taking kids who weren’t high recruited and putting them in a defense-first system. It resulted in making multiple sweet 16s and an elite eight—coming within a shitty defensive alignment on Scotty Reynolds away from the Final Four.

The lazy analysis is saying the move to the ACC killed Pitt. Truth is it was already dying thanks to Dixon’s lead recruiter, Barry Rohrrsen, leaving for a head coaching job the same way John Calipari leaving crippled Paul Evans. Also, it’s easy to overlook this one but moving from Adidas to Nike moved Pitt’s basketball program down the pecking order at basketball camps. You went from one of the big dogs at the Adidas camps to just another team at Nike.

I don’t think the stars will ever align again at Pitt the way they did 20 years ago. Hell of a fun run that I regret taking for granted.

 

The car I was in on the way to a playoff game broke down 100 miles from Albuquerque but a series of nice events happened so that we could make it to The Pit by the 2nd quarter.

 

Trying living a couple miles from it and being a bike rider. Holy crap did my lungs perpetually burn in that hilly city.

 

UConn redux

 

There’s 2feet of snow on the ground in Syracuse. It’ probably like that from thanksgiving to Easter. For that reason I do not begrudge Boeheim a little cheating. Who’s going to pay someone great to go there now that everyone pays players.

 

This would be something.