Penn State's Ed DeChellis escapes to Annapolis

DeChellis leaves the Big Ten to land in the Patriot League.

http://blog.pennlive.com/davidjones/2011/05/ed_dechellis_to_take_head_coac.html

Think about this.

Billy Lange leaves Navy head coaching post to take assistant's job at Villanova.

Ed DeChellis leaves Penn State head coaching post to take Billy Lange's old job.

That's about all you need to know about Penn State basketball, as I see it.

 

Penn State ranks down there with Northwestern and DePaul for unattractive college basketball programs. Even though they're in major conferences, I refuse to call them major programs.

 

Northwestern and Penn State? Agreed ... not exactly the stuff of major legend.

DePaul? At least it was back in the day. Oliver Purnell needs more than a year to see if the ghosts can be awakened. People in Dayton and Clemson can vouch for his ability to rebuild programs.

Shot is right ... this move tells us just about everything we need to know about basketball in State College.

 

Every Pennsylvania taxpayer should be in Harrisburg tomorrow demanding their money back for the Bryce-Jordan Center and PNC Park. They played better in freakin' Rec Hall.

 

Has Larry Brown denied interest in the job yet?

 

A little shocking, to be honest.

Navy can't buy coverage anywhere in the winter in the Mid-Atlantic. Not an easy road to respectability.

 

A lot of the Penn State fans believe the calvary has arrived with DeChellis leaving.

What these yahoos don't realize is that nobody will ever recruit top-50 basketball players to come to State College, Pa.

They should have given the guy a little love just for riding one good guard to a pair of plus-.500 conference seasons in the last three years.

To underline that: He made it to The Dance with one good guard. Period.

 

agreed. Talor Battle is as good as you're ever gonna get in State College. DeChellis got out before his team returned to complete and utter irrelevance this fall.

 

The kid oughta get three or four years of NBA time just for his work ethic.

 

No.

 

The end for Eddie started when he lost to Shippensburg in that exhibition game a few years ago.

But really ... I'd like to know who these Penn State fans think they're going to get. Yes, Ed's teams were frustrating, taking a step forward and then a step back, but them's the breaks in Happy Valley. Rolling the dice on Danny Earl would probably be the smart move.

Basketball also is about to fall further down the pecking order with varsity hockey showing up. Penn State will have a beast of a program in a relatively short period of time, and people will go nuts for that team.

 

Bless you.

Hockey's going to do well there, but of course, it's Cael Sanderson and the wrestling program that is really casting a long shadow over the basketball program.

Well, really it's JoePa's program casting a long shadow, but wrestling is dwarfing it, too.