It's that time of year: College coach carousel!

If I remember right, when he left he was coming off the season after the loss to the No. 14 seed in the NCAAs, finishing in the NIT. And the rumors were that the team's best player (Tyler Smith) would be transferring to Tennessee to be closer to his ill father. Those rumors ended up coming true.

In a postseason press conference, the new AD (who was not the one who hired Alford) said he was happy with how the team had progressed through the season ... but he made it a point to say that it would not be acceptable for the team to regress back to square one at the start of the next season. He made it clear he expected the program to continue to show growth from the point where it ended the season.

Make no mistake about it, Alford left on his own terms while he could, because he would almost surely have been fired at the end of the next season (when he knew he didn't have the players to succeed with).

I find it humorous how you phrased this part: "He no doubt would be at a higher profile program if he hadn't bumped into the unpleasantness that was Iowa, perhaps he's simply happy where he's at now."

By saying he just "bumped into unpleasantness" at Iowa, you're implying he didn't make any mistakes and none of the (many) failures that happened under his watch were his fault. That is far, far from the case.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=6317841

Really? Maybe a short-term fix with a coach-in-waiting on the staff, but he'd never allow it.

 

Larry Brown can mother-effing coach though. I'd view him as the equivalent of Texas Tech landing Bobby Knight - It's not a long term solution, but he will probably maximize the talent of whatever you have on hand, and also draw some media and recruit interest for as long as he's around. Given his age though, you'd definitely be going year-to-year on a possible replacement.

 

I thought Larry Johnson would be a perfect fit for them.

 

sg, difference with Knight is that he was nine or 10 years younger. A 70-year-old guy taking over a college program? Not expecting that to end well.

 

Turns out UNLV is gonna hire Dave Rice, which is significant in that he's the first guy with Tarkanian connections to get that job. Rice played on both the 1990 champs and '91 Final Four team and has been associate head coach at BYU the last few years:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=6323160

 

Wow ... from Tark-era UNLV to BYU and back to UNLV. Talk about seeing both ends of the program spectrum ...

 

Actually, he's the first Tarkanian-coached player to get the job, but longtime Tark assistant Tim Grgurich got the job after Massimino resigned in the mid-'90s, only to flame out after just seven games.

 

Didn't Tim G. also have some health issues? Or was that just a cover to get him out of there?

 

At one, you get kicked out for having consensual sex.
At the other, you wouldn't miss playing time for having unconsensual sex.