2022 college basketball coaching carousel of progress

This is a serious question. How can anyone win at Rhode Island. It is an A-10 school competing in a metro area with a population of a million and a Big East school in town. While I have only visited Rhode Island once and a thought it a nice place to live I don't know if I would want to spend a winter there if I could go someplace warmer and sunnier.

Where can Rhode Island find talent and divert it from going to the Big East?

 

They have a 7,600 seat arena, on a "traditional" college campus that's 15 minutes from the beach. By train, it's 3 hours to NYC or 90 minutes to Boston, and slightly quicker if you drive. The Atlantic 10 isn't the Big East, but most years it's a solid mid-major, and PC is a lower tier Big East school most years. (This is the first year they won the regular season title, and given their KenPom of 35, it's likely a fluke because they didn't play everyone thanks to Covid cancellations.) It's not a slam dunk of a job, but in the past 30 years, if you do well there - Danny Hurley, Jim Harrick, Al Skinner - you tend to get a better job.

 

The A-10 has a lot of teams with those issues. Richmond isn't beating Virginia for many guys. Neither will Dayton beat Ohio State.
But those places have good facilities and loyal fan bases. Sounds to me like they'd need a big donor to come through for facilities upgrades or some other of enhancement. Way back in the day, Al Skinner got out of there. Harrick did, too, but he was willing to cheat in a big way.

 

I can't remember how many times Harrick turned down the UGA job, then told URI he was leaving, then turned down the UGA job again.

They're a minnow in the A-10 but consider that UMass hasn't done squat since Camby and the opening is there.

 

I’d rather recruit to a mid-tier Atlantic 10 job in a town that cares than some dead end big city school like St. John’s, DePaul or even Georgetown.

 

Absolutely.
Think about this one. DePaul gets a new arena -- in the city, not out by O'Hare -- and one it can plausibly claim as its own. The program still sucks in part because it still has no real campus and is still trapped in a passionate pro market.
St. John's (the no campus part) is in a similar situation.
Georgetown has a campus and a great school but has no room for an on-campus arena. And as I understand it, no way to build one of more than 5,000 seats. They're screwed.
I'm not sure that Rhode Island is a particularly great gig, but I think I'd still take my chances there or another decent A-10 place over the aforementioned Big East programs.

 

Also, to be clear - The typical standard for "good job" at URI isn't to be a national championship contender. It's basically "make the tournament every two to four years." Jim Baron never made the tournament there, but stuck around for 10+ years because he had plenty of 20 win teams, and decent attendance numbers until the end. Yes, I think even the bad Big East jobs like St. John's and DePaul, they're more desirable to a coach on the rise, but I think it's overall a good situation at the mid-major level.

 

Many Three Chopt Tech fans were hoping URI would win and Mooney would finally get fired. The vitriol against him on the UR message boards is pretty extensive. OTOH, seeing as how he hasn't made the NCAAs in 11 years with the facilities and institutional support he has, maybe he deserves it. He'll get another earful tonight if the Spidahs lose to VCU, which I expect they will.

Is there a Catholic university anywhere with a huge, airy campus, like a Richmond or Furman, two of the country's prettiest? Like the Jesuit school in my home region (Canisius), they all seem to be shoehorned into a neighborhood someplace, about 50 acres of campus surrounded by a city, with no room for growth.

I guess there's lots of open space near the University of Detroit. But not the type of open space universities generally covet.

 

Illini trying to give a game away and Indiana won't take it.

 

Mooney is a little bit snake bit - They were really good in 2019-20, but if the tournament isn't actually held, it's hard to sell fans on "well we WOULD have made it!" That being said, Sports Reference has handy stat that notes that they returned 85.5 percent of their minutes played from last year to this year, and they're graduating six seniors who all play minutes for them. If you're not firing him and if he's not leaving, you probably need to commit to him for 2 or 3 years, because there's almost no chance they'll be as good next year, having to replace so many minutes on the fly.

 

Notre Dame. Not what you were getting at, but I have never seen so many fields and other open spaces on a college campus.

 

Good call. But I don't consider ND to be a typical representative of a Catholic university, it's in a league of its own.

Lots of open space on the downhill side of Gonzaga, too, and Mt. St. Mary's and Marist are very nice. So maybe I don't know WTF I'm talking about, that all Catholic universities aren't like St. Peter's, just the Northeast inner-city ones.