I know that I don’t know the whole story with these.\u00a0 And the media seems supportive of the recent firings of Ben Howland from UCLA and Tubby Smith from Minnesota – so maybe there is more than meets the eye here.\u00a0 But unless there is something behind the scenes going on, I just don’t get it.<\/p>\n
Ben Howland led the Bruins to 3 straight Final Fours.\u00a0 He has a losing season after losing two players early.\u00a0 Then, followed with a season including an NCAA tourney win, a 19 win season where they missed the tourney, and this season where they won the Pac 12 and then got eliminated early when their 2nd best scorer got hurt and couldn’t play.\u00a0 I get the fact that this is UCLA – supposedly one of the best jobs in the college ranks.\u00a0 Some reports say that he alienated the Southern California AAU teams hurting recruiting.\u00a0\u00a0 I realize that his last four seasons might not have been the best, but they were still 91-52.\u00a0 If something else is going on behind the scenes, then sure – you are UCLA, you can probably get someone equally good.\u00a0 But I don’t think you fire a coach who has gone 230-105 with 3 Final Four appearances after he has just won the conference regular season title because he isn’t winning enough.<\/p>\n
Tubby Smith’s numbers haven’t been as great as Howland’s.\u00a0 However, Tubby Smith also isn’t coaching at UCLA – Minnesota isn’t this glamorous place to go and play college basketball.\u00a0 In the 8 seasons before Smith took over, the Gophers had been to 1 NCAA tournament and 4 NITs.\u00a0 In the 6 seasons that Smith led, the Gophers went to 3 NCAA tournaments, 2 NITs, and never had an overall losing record.\u00a0\u00a0 You could point to his 46-62 Big 10 record,\u00a0 But that was better than the previous regime who went 47-81.\u00a0 His reward for winning the school’s first NCAA Tournament game in 16 years (23 years if you go to a win that wasn’t retroactively taken back due to NCAA sanctions for academic scandal) – that’s right, he was fired for that.<\/p>\n
Sure, there were things that might give you pause.\u00a0 Smith’s teams tended to fade in February.\u00a0 Howland had 2 of 4 years where he missed the tournament – which is unheard of at UCLA.\u00a0 But neither was fired after one of the bad years.\u00a0 Howland was fired after a Pac 12 championship, and Smith was fired after what arguably was the school’s most successful season in 16 years.<\/p>\n
I can see the lime-light of UCLA getting another top coach – but not sure which one will be willing to be held to the unattainable standard of NCAA Tournament success every single year.\u00a0 And I don’t know who in their right mind would go to Minnesota – where it is tough to recruit, have old facilities, and just cut loose a coach who was competing each year to make the tourney.<\/p>\n
But I do know – assuming that both still want to coach – there should be a lot of teams out there who will be really happy that Howland and Smith are available to take their coaching vacancy.\u00a0 Tubby Smith has 511 wins and has taken 4 different schools to the NCAA Tournament, including winning the championship at Kentucky.\u00a0 Ben Howland has 398 wins and has taken 3 different schools to the NCAA Tournament – including 3 Final Fours.\u00a0\u00a0 Schools could do a lot of worse than this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know that I don’t know the whole story with these.\u00a0 And the media seems supportive of the recent firings of Ben Howland from UCLA and Tubby Smith from Minnesota – so maybe there is more than meets the eye here.\u00a0 But unless there is something behind the scenes going on, I just don’t get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2013-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}