Gophers fans will formally meet their new head coach on Friday morning.
Well that was fun, wasn’t it? When’s the last time an ongoing event had you glued to Twitter or whatever social medium you use for more than a week? Every day I thought “the” announcement could be made any minute, and I didn’t want to miss it. And the drama was really something, with rumors here or leaks there; trying to piece everything together and separate speculation from fact.
In the end, though, the Gophers and Norwood Teague landed a guy that should spark some excitement for the program and provide the refresh we all craved. Things were getting a little stale around here and, for better or worse, there was the feeling that Tubby’s leash might not be that long. In fact, it ended up being much shorter than I could have imagined and I certainly didn’t expect him to get the axe the day after the season ended.
Richard Pitino embodies the type of coach that has made Teague look good in the past. He’s had success as an assistant at big-time programs, has the support of prime time coaches that he served under, and has shown success as a head coach at smaller programs. Teague has shown us, at the very least, that he knows how to discover talent where others aren’t looking, and this certainly fits that mold. Who said the offseason would be boring?
GOOD:
There’s a coach on board who has something to prove – If there’s one thing that I’m excited about after this whole coaching search it’s that we not only came away with a guy who isn’t a retread, but we got someone who is young, hungry and has the drive to make things happen here. There was a lot of talk and hope about possibly getting a “home run” hire and really making a splash with the choice. Sure, getting a big name coach would have been nice and all, but let’s just remember our last home run hire and how quickly that honeymoon ended. This time it was important to get a guy that had an attractive combination of success, desire, recognition and recruiting ability and possibility of making this program his own.
Now, Tubby Smith brought the team back from the basement and made them annually competitive, which is not an easy thing to do. And he deserves tons of credit for making Gopher basketball into a program where we could even daydream about landing someone great. But it’s also important to recognize when a program has plateaued, and it was becoming painfully clear that was happening here. Whether or not that was due to lack of interest on Smith’s part is debatable, but it certainly appeared that the program needed an energy injection.
Now we get a young coach who hasn’t been around the block, who hasn’t headed up a big time program. Pitino has the opportunity to show that his time at Florida International wasn’t a fluke and that he has what it takes to succeed in one of the nation’s top conferences. That’s an incredibly huge motivational tool for someone early in their career and it will be interesting to see his career here play out.
BAD:
There’s definitely fallout from the coaching search – While there’s rightfully a whole lot of excitement around town now that we have a seemingly capable coach in tow, it’s not like we came away unscathed. For one thing during the interim period where the team was without a head coach one of our two recruits for 2013-14, Alvin Ellis, decided to decommit from the team and try his luck on the open college market. Ellis, a capable shooting guard from Chicago, didn’t necessarily fit the biggest need of the Gophers, which is in the frontcourt, but losing a recruit is never good. And the Gophers will be hard pressed to find someone at Ellis’ level during the spring signing period, where pickings are much slimmer. Can Pitino re-recruit Ellis and get him back? Sure he can. But there’s also that old saying about a bird in the hand.
Second – and I realize this is completely debatable – with Tubby and his staff completely removed from the scene, the Gophers lose whatever inroads had been made with the Big Three. Vince Taylor had a good relationship with Rashad Vaughn, but it’s unclear how much progress had been made with Tyus Jones or Reid Travis. It’s entirely possible that Tubby and his staff made minimal impressions with any of the three, but at the same time Pitino will come into the situation starting at ground zero. Monter speculated that Pitino could keep Taylor in the mix as an assistant, but that remains to be seen. Pitino has a good recruiting history, so it could end up being addition by subtraction, but it’s hard to deny that Gophers solidified their current position of purgatory in the recruiting race with the coaching change.
INTERESTING:
The life of a story during a coaching search – Watching the reactions to every bit of story and rumor during the coaching search was amazing to me. This was the first time I’d been part of a coaching search with the advent of social media, which lent quick insight into the pulse of both the fan base and media. What struck me the most was how quickly rumor became (and continues to be, actually) accepted as fact. Norwood Teague muddled the media’s plans by giving effectively zero insight into the process, how it was going and how far from the original plan things had deviated. What did everyone do? Naturally they started to speculate. Was Teague going after Shaka Smart? Brad Stevens? Fred Hoiberg? There were reports of extensions being offered, but it was unclear if Minnesota had actually approached any of these candidates directly. It was even unclear how the whole Flip Saunders thing went down, even though the whole saga was reported as if the story of both sides had been accurately reportered. In short, no one knew for sure what had actually happened, they could only guess.
And most of those guesses implied that Teague was having trouble finding a suitable candidate to fill the position. This sentiment, due to some irresponsible reporting, soon became accepted as the official narrative – that Teague actually WAS messing the whole thing up. As if taking time to really consider the proper candidates, work out terms and make a big decision was somehow “embarrassing” for the university. To me, it was interesting to watch the pulse of the fan base and media ebb and flow with each tidbit, however contrived those might be, watch a small rumor spiral wildly out of control and see it directly impact public perception.