Changing the Coach Won’t Always Change Fortunes
Every year around this time, the NCAA Tournament and the coaching carousel are the two biggest topics of discussion in college basketball. The NIT is in the mix, and players transferring or declaring for the NBA Draft make the news as well, but a lot revolves around the NCAA Tournament and coaching changes. In past years, the coaching carousel was almost a sidebar at this time, but now it’s a major topic, and that’s because of some changes this time around that are not good.
If the coaching business was crazy beforehand, it’s outright nutty now. Several coaches were fired during the season, a troubling trend by itself. But more than that, since the season has ended for most schools, we’ve seen several coaching changes that at best are head-scratchers.
- A year after being the MAC Coach of the Year, Stan Joplin was fired by Toledo.
- Barry Hinson was fired at Missouri State after averaging just under 19 wins a year and producing seven straight winning seasons.
- Late in the season, Dean Keener resigned from James Madison to avoid being fired after four seasons at the helm. He cleaned up the program, then was snake-bit during this season as the team had talent and looked to be on the verge of turning the corner before injuries hit.
- Rob Flaska was fired after just three seasons at the helm of Centennary. He never really got a chance to build anything.
- Rodney Tention was forced out at Loyola Marymount after just three seasons. In his first season, the Lions were agonizingly close to the NCAA Tournament, and in his second season they were injury-riddled.
- Most ridiculous of all, George Pfeifer was fired by Idaho after just two seasons at the helm. They weren’t good seasons in the least, with just 12 wins total, but the program was struggling mightily beforehand and that wasn’t going to change in just two years.
None of these decisions make much sense, at least with what’s currently known. The coaches never really got a chance to do anything there, except in Joplin’s case as he was there for 12 seasons and Hinson’s since he was there for nine. Save for Missouri State, which was coming off an NCAA Sweet 16 appearance, none of the situations was very good when the current coach arrived, and that wasn’t likely to change in short order.
This isn’t a question of fairness to the coaches involved. After all, one successful season out of four or five is often enough to buy a coach either a higher-paying job or a new contract paying them much more money. Also, coaches have been known to put their name out for other jobs or even make overtures to other schools to get leverage for a richer contract with their current school. Additionally, coaches generally get all of what they are owed for time remaining on their contracts after this. Coaches will generally agree that this is a high-risk, high-reward business, and even those who get fired often still get a decent paycheck for a time.
So the point of this isn’t to take up for the coaches as if they have it so bad. The point is to look at this practically, and from that standpoint, many of these moves look questionable.
For programs who decide that changing the coach is the way to change a program’s fortunes, they might have something else coming. It’s difficult to ever get any kind of continuity when you change coaches every few years while little else changes, thinking that just changing the coach will magically lead to the desired results. When a coach is fired, players often leave as well and either transfer to another school or just try to play pro ball. That basically shoots any momentum the prior coach may have established right out the window and means it’s back to square one.
There are some situations where no coach is going to turn a program around in just four or five years. For much of this season, there was rampant speculation about Norm Roberts’ future at St. John’s. There were “Fire Norm” chants at home games to boot, and some who have covered the Red Storm could see it taking a toll on him. But the reality is that whether or not Roberts is ultimately the man to turn the program around, no one was going to make that program a big winner right away. Roberts inherited a disastrous situation in terms of returning talent and having the program on probation, as well as New York kids not liking St. John’s because of the prior staff. It took a long time for him to get a decent group of New York kids, but he finally got it this past year and seems to have made some real inroads. Next season will tell whether they’re truly headed in the right direction or not now that this year’s freshmen have more experience.
In some cases, firing a coach in short order for no apparent reason other than not winning enough – not because of NCAA violations or having one player after another getting into problems off the court – is really an admission by the athletic director that they didn’t hire the right person in the first place. They will never openly admit that, of course, but that doesn’t change the reality. That might very well be the case with Idaho, as they hired their new head coach less than a week after they fired Pfeifer. It seems they already had someone in mind.
This isn’t something that’s likely to get better. In fact, it’s likely to get worse, because athletic directors are likely to look at an example like San Diego. The school forced out Brad Holland after last season and hired former Gonzaga assistant Bill Grier. In his first season, the Toreros beat Kentucky early on and won the West Coast Conference championship, then knocked off Connecticut in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. They might look at that and think that changing the head coach to the right guy will lead to the same result.
But reality is that it’s not that simple; while Grier did a great job with the team, it’s not like he alone did it. Not only that, but the team he inherited wasn’t lacking talent, only experience as there isn’t a senior on the roster and it featured the inside-outside combo of Gyno Pomare and Brandon Johnson, the latter of whom gutted out the win over Connecticut.
We’re now entering the week of the Final Four, when a lot of things happen in the coaching carousel as coaches and athletic directors travel to the site. Before the week is out, there are sure to be a number of changes, both with vacancies filled and some new ones created along the way as some currently employed head coaches are sure to take new jobs. While the new coaches and their new bosses will talk about things like “a new direction” and “new hope” for programs that fired or forced out a coach, in many cases that has to be accepted as simply toting the party line. A coach alone is rarely the solution for a flagging program, and in about four or five years, that might become clear once again at some of the same schools.
