One thing maybe we have all kind of said if you piece all of the various different comments together, but has not been stated, I don't think, as one separate and pieced together thought, is...
Look at Flips progression.
The higher the age and talent of his players, the less success he was perceived to have attained.
At Detroit, they already had one of the best teams in the NBA, all he had to do was figure out how to get them to perform to the best of their abilities at the right time of the season. He got them to perform well during the regular season but just struggled to get them to win the NBA Title.
Drop down a notch, at Minnesota, where the T-Pups were hardly as good as the Detroit Piston team he took over, he got them to perform at a level they never had before, and at a level they never have since he left. And Kevin Garnett was much of the reason for that and Kevin Garnett was a very young man when he started playing for the T-Pups, no older than those coming into the Gopher program as freshman every year.
Drop down another notch, to his days in the CBA. Now these guys are older than college students, but many of them are guys just short of being good enough for the NBA, and possibly more willing to accept guidance and instruction in the hope of improving their game in order to get to the NBA.
How did Flip do in the CBA??? He is considered by some to be arguably the best coach ever in CBA history, or at least one of the Top 5 or 10 of all time. In one 4 year period, he won either a CBA Title or COY in 3 of the 4 years and the one year won both, and for two different teams.
Finally, going down to his college Head Coaching experience, and yes, they were not Major College level, but they were still college students, and he had his most success as far as wins vs losses while coaching college kids, and they won 56 straight home games. The team never lost a home game the entire time Flip was coaching them. If that is all he ever did, was make us unbeatable at home, that alone would make us annually a tournament bound team and more often than once every six years as has been our historical pattern since the 1948, a Top 25 team.
I think that Flip would come into the job wanting more than anything to help put the Gophers back onto the map. At least for the first 2 or 3 years he would work tirelessly to bring in all the states top recruits and top recruits from around the country. I think he would also strive to bring in some of the best Asst coaches from around the country with the mindset of grooming one of them to take over for him within 5 years. Not saying that if he got us to the top of the Big Ten that he'd all of a sudden want to retire, so that asst coach might either leave for a head coaching job or wait patiently til Flip retired. If he did leave, then he could just get another hot young coach to come in to be groomed. He'd hopefully bring in a top notch recruiter so that after those first 2 or 3 years if he started to tire of traveling all over the country, he could have that asst cover out of state recruiting. If we keep producing top notch recruits in state like we have been lately, and we start nabbing them all, we wouldn't need a ton of recruits from out of state. We could maybe even start stealing them from ND, Iowa and Wisconsin, hehe.
I think that one of the biggest benefits of bringing in Flip, would be what he could do to inspire the Gopher supporters with the money.
Remember who was most responsible for getting the new Baseball Stadium built. ALUM Paul Molitor. He worked tirelessly for what? 7 years to get that done?!
Just think of what Flip could do here in just 2-3 years if he worked the same way.
Guys like Sid Hartman would just love the hire and would talk up Flip in the press endlessly, and things like that might drum up fan interest and big money support that some unknown hire just wouldn't be able to accomplish UNTIL he was able to pull off the VCU like run to the FF, but that could be 3 or 4 years down the run after he was hired, IF he wasn't the next Brewster.
The more I think about it, the more the idea grows on me. I wanted Flip before when we instead opted for Tubby. But I don't think Flip wanted the job back then. I think he was still thinking about winning an NBA Title. I think those dreams have past him by and NBA teams aren't banging down his door, and he may have tired of trying to work with egotistical NBA players, and he's thinking instead of the possibilities of winning an NCAA title here and here at Minnesota is the best chance he'd have to do that.
All the pieces seem to fit.
