College Hoops Coaching Carousel

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#126      

Fighter of the Nightman

Fighter of the Nightman
Chicago, IL
Fighter of the Nightman
There seems to be a perception that Texas is a job with intensely high expectations, and maybe that is now true. However, they have not acted on these in the past.

- Rick Barnes was given a pretty damn long grace period for a supposed "elite job" or whatever. He had all of the talent in the world, and he failed to make a Sweet Sixteen in his final SEVEN years at Texas, won zero conference titles and finished the year ranked ONCE. Imagine what this fan base would be saying about Underwood at that point if some are turning on him for one rebuilding year as an NCAA Tournament team?!
- Shaka Smart never won any conference championships in his six seasons, never made it out of the First Round in ANY of his five NCAAT seasons (COVID cancelled one where they likely would have missed it), made the NCAA Tournament in only three of his five non-COVID chances and finished ranked ONE time. While the heat was on when he left for Marquette, he was going to enter year 7 and had not yet been fired.

Texas has unparalleled money and no-doubt believes they have a God-given right to athletic success in light of that, but let's not pretend like their basketball fans expect Blue Blood results ... it takes one read through their message board to see that they do not view themselves, their history or even their future in that regard. Their basketball history is easily worse than ours.
 
#127      

BashCtIllini

BashCtIllini
BashCtIllini
bluemountain said:
UT is a tough job. The thing is, there is nothing in Terry's background that says he is a bad coach. Fresno and UTEP are not exactly basketball hotbeds these days and both programs showed improvement after he took over. He certainly didn't do poorly as Texas' head coach. Granted, he was coaching players recruited by someone else, but was successful at rallying the troops, so to speak. He has 2 5* recruits lined up for next year already. So maybe he could surprise people and succeed.
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I don't think he improved Freson State or UTEP. He's going to the SEC which is now a better conference than the Big 12. He'll be going against Nate Oats, Calipari, Buzz Williams, Rick Barnes, Musselman, Satan, and now Chris Beard all seasoned proven coaches. Then there is guys like Gates, Stackhouse, and other up and coming young coaches.

There are only 10 teams in the Big 12 total, 4 of them were not particularly good this year, coincidentally the last place team is coached by a guy who was a big name off of March success as well. In the SEC there 8 teams (Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas A&M, Auburn, Missouri, Ole Miss) that should be very strong teams, so life in the SEC won't be easy for Terry.
 
#128      

FreshlySqueezed

FreshlySqueezed
FreshlySqueezed
BashCtIllini said:
I don't think he improved Freson State or UTEP. He's going to the SEC which is now a better conference than the Big 12. He'll be going against Nate Oats, Calipari, Buzz Williams, Rick Barnes, Musselman, Satan, and now Chris Beard all seasoned proven coaches. Then there is guys like Gates, Stackhouse, and other up and coming young coaches.

There are only 10 teams in the Big 12 total, 4 of them were not particularly good this year, coincidentally the last place team is coached by a guy who was a big name off of March success as well. In the SEC there 8 teams (Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas A&M, Auburn, Missouri, Ole Miss) that should be very strong teams, so life in the SEC won't be easy for Terry.
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By no objective measure is the SEC a better basketball conference than the Big 12.

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4 were not particularly good? 7 of the 10 made the tournament and Oklahoma State was on the bubble. Their "worst" team was Texas Tech who was 63rd on KenPom.

Georgia, South Carolina, Ole Miss, and LSU were significantly worse and Florida and Vanderbilt were worse than any Big 12 school.
 
#129      

Ransom Stoddard

Ransom Stoddard
Ordained Dudeist Priest
Bloomington, IL
Ransom Stoddard
Fighter of the Nightman said:
Great anecdote, and thank you for sharing. It is often difficult to pin down just what was so bad about RG - after all, his hires were objectively better than his successor, so an RG loyalist has plenty of ammo to defend him - as the issues are more intangible and about his narrow perspective. I've mentioned here before that I am from Peoria (so was born a huge Illini fan) but grew up in Iowa City, often tailgating with my friends ... I will never forget the shock and disappointment I felt when I went to my first Illini football game and the coolest tailgating area right by the stadium (in what is now Grange Grove) had about the least atmosphere I have ever seen in my life at a college football game - spaced out lots, completely subdued people, literally security making sure a loose football didn't wind up in the wrong area!! RG's perspective was that this was A-okay, as those people were big donors and they were the ones who deserved those primo spots. Josh Whitman's perspective, infinitely more creative, was ... "How can I both improve the gameday experience/reputation of Memorial Stadium while rewarding our donors in a different spot?" Little things like Grange Grove would have never happened under RG, and it's already made an astounding difference in the Memorial Stadium tailgating scene.
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My take on the first part of this is that RG didn't appear to be interested in what is now Champion's Club or below. RG liked high rollers, as there were fewer of them to try to appease (not that I feel like my All-American Club donation earns me any special treatment). Guys I knew that were a generation older referred to him as "Country Club Ron" because that's who he was after.
 
#130      

BashCtIllini

BashCtIllini
BashCtIllini
FreshlySqueezed said:
By no objective measure is the SEC a better basketball conference than the Big 12.

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4 were not particularly good? 7 of the 10 made the tournament and Oklahoma State was on the bubble. Their "worst" team was Texas Tech who was 63rd on KenPom.

Georgia, South Carolina, Ole Miss, and LSU were significantly worse and Florida and Vanderbilt were worse than any Big 12 school.
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Are they replaying this year or are they moving on to next year? Texas will be in the SEC so take on of the top teams away from the Big 12 and move them to the SEC? The SEC simply has a larger volume of difficult teams to play.
 
#131      

sbillini

sbillini
st petersburg, fl
sbillini
BashCtIllini said:
Are they replaying this year or are they moving on to next year? Texas will be in the SEC so take on of the top teams away from the Big 12 and move them to the SEC? The SEC simply has a larger volume of difficult teams to play.
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So Terry will have a harder time in the SEC because moving the team he coaches to the SEC will make the SEC a harder conference to win in? That's impressive logic right there.

Teams in both leagues play 18 or so conference games. So it doesn't really matter how many teams are in the conference. What primarily matters is the average strength of the overall conference. Big 12 has pretty consistently been a better conference than the SEC...even if you exclude texas from both.
 
#132      

FreshlySqueezed

FreshlySqueezed
FreshlySqueezed
BashCtIllini said:
Are they replaying this year or are they moving on to next year? Texas will be in the SEC so take on of the top teams away from the Big 12 and move them to the SEC? The SEC simply has a larger volume of difficult teams to play.
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And add Houston, who was arguably better than Texas.

The SEC always has a bunch of bottom feeding teams. The SEC has a larger volume of teams, not difficult teams. Look at any advanced metrics.

The Big 12 finished as the top conference on KenPom every year from 2014 to 2019. They finished 2nd to the Big Ten in 2020 and 2021 and were the best conference in 2022 and 2023.
 
#133      

sbillini

sbillini
st petersburg, fl
sbillini
sbillini said:
So Terry will have a harder time in the SEC because moving the team he coaches to the SEC will make the SEC a harder conference to win in? That's impressive logic right there.

Teams in both leagues play 18 or so conference games. So it doesn't really matter how many teams are in the conference. What primarily matters is the average strength of the overall conference. Big 12 has pretty consistently been a better conference than the SEC...even if you exclude texas from both.
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to put some data behind this -

Average Kenpom MBB ranking by conference (current):

SEC - 74.04
Big 12 - 28.9
Big 12 ex Texas - 31.5
Big Ten (Just for fun) - 52.8
 
#135      

DeeAndDWill

DeeAndDWill
DeeAndDWill
Fighter of the Nightman said:
Little things like Grange Grove would have never happened under RG, and it's already made an astounding difference in the Memorial Stadium tailgating scene.
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Thing is - Grange Gove isn't a "little thing". It's a HUGE part of game day experience and building excitement and passion and showing that you want to create an experience fans WANT to be involved in.

That. Not being interested in any alumni/potential donor that wasn't "sipping warmed brandy in large leather chairs with local donors at the country club". Half assing facilities. No interest in creating a game day experience that is fun, exciting, or modern. Not having a clue on using the student base to help in stadium excitement/noise/etc. Mishandling coaches.

Acting like it was East Central Illinois was absolutely damning at a Big Ten school with the largest alumni base. Doing it while the landscape of college athletics was changing, modernizing, and advancing all around them leaving Illinois years behind the curve? I will never let go of my contempt for that man. Ever.

I'm just grateful that Whitman has not taken on many of the outdated views of his former boss, and I'll pause talking about RG and focus on what's important - Yelling at players - good or bad?
 
#136      

ChiefGritty

ChiefGritty
Chicago, IL
ChiefGritty
DeeAndDWill said:
Thing is - Grange Gove isn't a "little thing". It's a HUGE part of game day experience and building excitement and passion and showing that you want to create an experience fans WANT to be involved in.

That. Not being interested in any alumni/potential donor that wasn't "sipping warmed brandy in large leather chairs with local donors at the country club". Half assing facilities. No interest in creating a game day experience that is fun, exciting, or modern. Not having a clue on using the student base to help in stadium excitement/noise/etc. Mishandling coaches.

Acting like it was East Central Illinois was absolutely damning at a Big Ten school with the largest alumni base. Doing it while the landscape of college athletics was changing, modernizing, and advancing all around them leaving Illinois years behind the curve? I will never let go of my contempt for that man. Ever.

I'm just grateful that Whitman has not taken on many of the outdated views of his former boss, and I'll pause talking about RG and focus on what's important - Yelling at players - good or bad?
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RG had a very specific and intensely felt concept of what the DIA was and who it was for, and that vision was incorrect and out of step with where the industry was in 1992 and it kept being farther and farther and farther off base by the year.

People forget this stuff, but I really think it's clarifying that one big thing that attracted RG to Zook was how horrified he was by FireRonZook.com.

FireRonZook.com is in general an underdiscussed and understudied artifact of history, it was ahead of its time and foretold our current culture and politics in a really prescient way. But we can all see now that that sort of democratized public-facing branding of sports teams was the future, and it was a future RG would never give into.
 
#138      

NASchamp

NASchamp
Atlanta
NASchamp
ChiefGritty said:
RG had a very specific and intensely felt concept of what the DIA was and who it was for, and that vision was incorrect and out of step with where the industry was in 1992 and it kept being farther and farther and farther off base by the year.

People forget this stuff, but I really think it's clarifying that one big thing that attracted RG to Zook was how horrified he was by FireRonZook.com.

FireRonZook.com is in general an underdiscussed and understudied artifact of history, it was ahead of its time and foretold our current culture and politics in a really prescient way. But we can all see now that that sort of democratized public-facing branding of sports teams was the future, and it was a future RG would never give into.
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Agree. Very outdated outlook and no willingness to change. That was the worst part.

Source: worked at DIA for 3ish years.
 
#139      

IlliniCub 16

IlliniCub 16
IlliniCub 16
Rhoades is a good coach and it is a nice hire for PSU.

Obviously the roster was going to look completely different anyway with the Penn State graduations, but man are PSU-Illinois games next year going to be much different than this season lol.

VCU shot only 17.4 threes per game, which ranked last in the Atlantic 10 while Penn State shot 26.9, most in the Big Ten.
 
#142      

NJJ871

N
NJJ871
IlliniCub 16 said:
Rhoades is a good coach and it is a nice hire for PSU.

Obviously the roster was going to look completely different anyway with the Penn State graduations, but man are PSU-Illinois games next year going to be much different than this season lol.

VCU shot only 17.4 threes per game, which ranked last in the Atlantic 10 while Penn State shot 26.9, most in the Big Ten.
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I don't care if PSU shoots way more or way less 3's against us next year, as long as we do a lot better than 20-71 28.2% in our games against them. Man, watching us not run any offense and simply chuck bad 3's made me ill.
 
#143      

IlliniCub 16

IlliniCub 16
IlliniCub 16
NJJ871 said:
I don't care if PSU shoots way more or way less 3's against us next year, as long as we do a lot better than 20-71 28.2% in our games against them. Man, watching us not run any offense and simply chuck bad 3's made me ill.
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That's true, but shooting was a problem the team will have to address regardless of opponent. And Penn State didn't do anything special defensively to cause those low percentages, we were just a bad shooting team.

The Shrewsberry offense at Penn State gave the team fits every time they played them though. Very happy to see that moving on to South Bend.
 
#145      

Fighter of the Nightman

Fighter of the Nightman
Chicago, IL
Fighter of the Nightman
NJJ871 said:
I don't care if PSU shoots way more or way less 3's against us next year, as long as we do a lot better than 20-71 28.2% in our games against them. Man, watching us not run any offense and simply chuck bad 3's made me ill.
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Agree for the first two games, but ... I don't know if it was because I was there and pumped that we painted the place orange or what, but I didn't feel we played poorly against them in the BTT. We just simply looked like the worse team. Ironically, that actually severely depleted my hopes that I had had since January that we still had the capability of a deep run in March Madness. :(
 
#146      

NJJ871

N
NJJ871
IlliniCub 16 said:
That's true, but shooting was a problem the team will have to address regardless of opponent. And Penn State didn't do anything special defensively to cause those low percentages, we were just a bad shooting team.

The Shrewsberry offense at Penn State gave the team fits every time they played them though. Very happy to see that moving on to South Bend.
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A very fair point - my comment is basically poor analysis and based completely on the frustration built up over this season's performance.
 
#147      

NJJ871

N
NJJ871
Fighter of the Nightman said:
Agree for the first two games, but ... I don't know if it was because I was there and pumped that we painted the place orange or what, but I didn't feel we played poorly against them in the BTT. We just simply looked like the worse team. Ironically, that actually severely depleted my hopes that I had had since January that we still had the capability of a deep run in March Madness. :(
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I had reached that point maybe 2 weeks before, perhaps the OSU game. I refrained from posting at all because all I wanted to say was what are you seeing that makes you think this will get turned around? And I really don't like arguing with people who care about the Illini as much as I do. Better to keep my (posting) yap shut.

Not referring to you or any individual at all, just the board collectively - and I don't think I'm/was right, just how I felt.
 
#148      

FreshlySqueezed

FreshlySqueezed
FreshlySqueezed
NJJ871 said:
I had reached that point maybe 2 weeks before, perhaps the OSU game. I refrained from posting at all because all I wanted to say was what are you seeing that makes you think this will get turned around? And I really don't like arguing with people who care about the Illini as much as I do. Better to keep my (posting) yap shut.

Not referring to you or any individual at all, just the board collectively - and I don't think I'm/was right, just how I felt.
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We need people like you to post more. Level-headed and respectful.

The OSU game got me to the same point it got you.
 
#150      

the national

the national
the Front Range
the national
BashCtIllini said:
John Groce was not good, but Groce was not the problem. Mike Thomas was the problem. That was the hire that set us up for the fall we had in both Football and Basketball. He hired a defensive minded head coach who had terrible defenses. Thus it was a shock to no one that Matt Campbell, the OC, was actually responsible for Toledo's wins, proven by his success at Iowa State and Beckman's failure. Groce never finished better than 3rd in the MAC, but Thomas thought this was the right guy. Groce took the losses, but Thomas was to blame.
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Doc Brown GIF by Back to the Future Trilogy
 
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