College basketball coaching carousel

No support and can you get an arena built? No and YES (edit...forgot the Galen Center). But no on support kills it. Plus the whole Tim Floyd mess, but that's temporary.

 

This was the exact impression I had of Marshall as a visiting beat writer when he was at Winthrop. Perfectly put.

 

I don't know about Georgia Tech as a Top 30 job ... disinterested fan base, tough school academically, they've had some flash-in-the-pan success but rarely anything sustained. Maybe the new building will help. This year's Georgia Tech looked as bad as any major college basketball team I've ever seen. Actually, they were a step ahead of Boston College. Oy.

 

When Cremins was there he carried Tech to elite status on the sheer enthusiasm of his personality. It will take a similarly dynamic personality to draw recruits to the atmosphere that exists at Tech and to energize the fan base to basketball (because football is everything there). I could see a real high-energy sort like, say, Buzz Williams kicking ass at Tech (not that he would ever go there), but it's going to take a special kind of coach to win consistently there.

 

Georgia Tech is doing a $45 million refurb on its gym, is in a fertile recruiting area and has its membership card in the ACC. If it's not top 30, it's high in the also receiving votes pile.

 

I'm not saying it can't be top 30, but as presently constituted, it's a total mess. Gregory has his work cut out for him. But hell, two years ago, they had Derrick Favors, so there's that.

 

There's no way in hell you can include Ga. Tech among the top 20 (or even 30) programs in the country. It's not even among the top half of the ACC. Right now, after the three on Tobacco Road, you'd have to look at Florida State and Miami being where Ga. Tech hopes to be in 3-5 years. And Maryland and Virginia have more tradition than Ga. Tech and appear to be headed in the right direction with new coaches. GT has a long way to go to catch up. And most of the programs it's chasing aren't standing still, either.

 

Even Wake Forest is a structurally better program than GT. And the state of Georgia makes the state of Illinois look like basketball overachievers. They can't even get a crappy autobid school into the tournament, much less rouse Tech or UGa out of that slumber. You have to try hard to have a natural in with Atlanta area players and completely squander it.

 

I'd disagree that Virginia has more basketball tradition than Georgia Tech. At worst, they're on equal footing. The days of Ralph Sampson were a long time ago, while it wasn't that long ago that the Yellow Jackets were losing to Connecticut in the championship game.

On the other hand, I would slip Wake Forest in ahead of Georgia Tech. I'd say within the ACC you have a first tier of basketball tradition consisting of the three Triangle Schools, a second tier of Maryland & Wake and then on the next rung would be Georgia Tech and Virginia with the rest of the league bunched up below those schools.

 

The first group is money with the possible exception of Michigan.

After the break, I'd take the Illinois job over Marquette, Purdue, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Cincy, Pitt, Arkansas and arguably St. John's and Oregon.

That would put it somewhere around 20-22 in my eyes.

 

Not only that, but he had a gigantic amount of staff turnover in the same time period. Grant got VCU after title 1, Jones went to Marshall after title 2. The guy he tired to replace Grant turned out to be a total hump and got the boot after 2 years, replaced by Smart who then got VCU. For a guy who'd had 2 assistants from his original staff for a decade, that's a lot to adjust to.

 

No, Wake Forest isn't. Travis McKie, Tony Chennault, and Carson Derosiers are all transferring. The language in the press release doesn't state where they're going next. Looks like Jeff Bzdelik is getting permission to hit the "reset" button.

Things are a genuine mess in Winston-Salem, even worse than what Brian Gregory is trying to deal with in Atlanta. Granted, after the second or third suspension, even Glen Rice Jr. had to go. But Gregory hasn't soured people in Atlanta to the best of my knowledge. There is precious little buzz with Bzdelik and can't imagine Ron Wellman is feeling the love he did five years ago, either.