2022 college basketball coaching carousel of progress

Judging from the Cats boards I so enjoyed perusing last night, most of them want Brad Stevens or Bruce Pearl. Go figure.

 

Oh definitely but there were a ton of Kentucky fans there.

 

Florida looking west to replace Mike White:



Two years as an Auburn assistant is his only SEC experience.

 

Lindsay Hunter out at Mississippi Valley State. His 3-year record was 7-75. Ouch!

USF has had a nice string of successful coaches, who then leave. Their last coach (or maybe two coaches ago) left for Washington State. You can probably buy a house in Pullman/Moscow and your mortgage payment would be 1/3 of your monthly rent in SF.

 

Done.

 

Well how can they afford to hold onto a coach when they can't even afford a third period on their jerseys?

 

Congratulations U.F

 

I was in Mississippi for a decade. Don't recall anything quite that extreme.

Batman said it well earlier. The only thing I will add is at one point, Stansbury had an assistant who had the reputation for being an outstanding recruiter. IIRC, the man's name was Robert something. Later when the gentleman was an assistant at Georgetown, he seemed to get a lot of credit for the Hoyas landing Otto Porter Jr. out of southeast Missouri.

 

MVSU is a wasteland.

 

Yeah, even by SWAC standards it's a shithole, which is saying something.
We had a local guy sign to play football there a couple of years ago, but he disappeared off the roster before the season started. Caught up to his dad recently and asked about it, and he said there were all kinds of issues with scholarship money not being credited or paid, among other administrative dysfunction. God only knows what a real deep dive audit would reveal.

 

At one point, and this was many years ago, MVSU's football stadium was condemned. As in, it was unsafe for spectators. Willie Totten was head coach. Pretty good guy.

 

They built a new basketball arena, and I think they at least got the football stadium up to code. But it's still a small agricultural college in a god-forsaken backwater of the backwaters of Mississippi. It's damn near impossible to recruit there. They've had some modest success in basketball over the years and won the SWAC title a few times, but their football coach worked a minor miracle last season by finishing 4-7.

Bringing it back around, Lindsey Hunter was a local guy (from Mississippi, played at Jackson State) who apparently felt the call to come back home and try to give back and make it work. The SWAC schools get a lot of those missionary types. A handful of schools give them the resources to give it a go, or at least enough to be competitive in the conference. Others, like Valley, it's like trying to pull five junior high kids out of class to beat a team of NBA all-stars.