Case Study at G'Town: Right Coach Makes it a Good Job.

[Water Pony]

How did Georgetown go from the bottom to the top and back?
How did Okla State, Maryland and Stanford go to the head of the class?
What coaching choices made a diference?
Air Force, the worst BB job in US?

John Feinstein, a great writer, sums up his views in this Wash. Post article. Good reading.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Mar17.html

[Hoop Fan]

sounds like a good topic, any chance of a cut and paste? Right or wrong, I avoid registering for those things.

[BigEasyPony]

It's a good article and that is exactly how I feel about the SMU job. Reading this article doesn't make it clear who the next HC should be, but instead how important it is to hire the right guy whomever that may be. SMU can once again be a nationally competitive basketball program and that is why this hire is critical. I notice Auburn is in the market for a new HC now. The competition stiffens, but they'll attract higher profile names that wouldn't be interested in us anyway.

I hope Copeland and the committee get busy on hiring our next coach after the 1st and 2nd round games. My guess is that the Stanford, Kansas and UT assistants will be the only ones busy after the first 2 rounds are over. That will make it difficult to bring one of those guys in for a campus interview. I think Copeland will make a recommendation of two (2) to three (3) finalists to the committee and try to bring those guys in.

[Water Pony]

By John Feinstein:
In the past few weeks, as more and more people speculated on the future of Georgetown Coach Craig Esherick, there were all sorts of questions about the direction of the program. Specifically, people asked whether Georgetown was still a good job, the kind of job that a rising young coach would want. Now that Esherick has been fired, that question will be answered soon. The answer should be a resounding yes -- sort of.

In college basketball, there is no such thing as a good job or bad job. There are good coaches and bad coaches, period. The coach makes the job, not the other way around. A bad coach -- or the wrong coach, depending on your point of view -- can quickly take what appeared to be a great job and make it into a bad one. Exhibit A in recent history would be the sad story of Matt Doherty and North Carolina. If there were a program in the country where you couldn't possibly lose, it had to be Carolina. Great facilities, beautiful school, the best conference and the legacy of Dean Smith.

Doherty was 8-19 in his second season. Carolina missed the postseason for the first time in 36 years. A year later, even after improving to 19-16, Doherty was fired amid reports several star players had threatened to transfer if he wasn't removed. The Indiana job doesn't look like such a great job these days either. IU is home for the postseason for the first time in 27 years, missing the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1985.

Then there's the other side of the coin. Air Force had to be the worst job in the country when Joe Scott arrived there four years ago. It's a pretty good job right now with the Falcons 22-6 and getting ready to play in the NCAA tournament. When John Thompson was hired as Georgetown's coach 32 years ago, was it a good job? The school president who hired him told him he would be extremely pleased if the Hoyas could make it to the NIT every few years. Thompson had bigger plans and bigger dreams. Georgetown was in the NCAAs his third season and didn't look back until it won the national championship in 1984.

Esherick's failure had nothing to do with changes in the Big East or in the school's philosophy. If anything, he failed because he tried to run the program in exactly the same manner Thompson had run it. There's only one person who can get away with running a program the way Thompson did, and he is currently a radio talk show host. Should Georgetown build an on-campus arena with about 8,000 seats? Absolutely. But it should have built that arena more than 20 years ago, when it opted not to because the powers-that-were at the school tried to cash in on Thompson's success by moving the team to Capital Centre.

It worked as long as Patrick Ewing was playing center and Thompson was motivated to recruit, but they've been gone for years. And even though Georgetown President John DiGioia insisted in his statement two weeks ago that Esherick was his coach now and forever, it was apparent to everyone in basketball that Esherick wasn't going to be able to recapture the magic. The school is now bleeding money trying to play off-campus, and what was once the most feared program in the country is now a laughingstock. Hours before his administration building was scheduled to be picketed by angry students, fans and alumni, DiGioia reversed himself and fired Esherick. If Esherick was stunned, he was entitled, given what DiGioia had said a couple of weeks ago. But he certainly didn't help himself by claiming that judging him on wins and losses was akin to judging him the way an NBA coach would be judged.

All coaches are judged on wins and losses. At some schools, that's all they're judged on; at a school such as Georgetown, graduation rates and keeping players out of trouble is also taken into consideration. But no coach, whether in the Ivy League, Big East or NBA, keeps his job if he doesn't win. If coaching were just about getting players to class and graduating them, why not put an English professor in charge of the basketball team?

The bottom line is this: Georgetown did not become a bad job when Esherick became the coach. To be fair, Thompson did not exactly leave his ex-assistant in an ideal position, getting out of Dodge after an 0-4 start in the Big East in 1999, leaving Esherick to clean up the mess. Esherick tried, but he simply couldn't do it. The 2001 season was a blip, nothing more. He couldn't recruit the way Thompson recruited because he wasn't Thompson, and he had trouble retaining the players he did recruit. No one wins without players, not Mike Krzyzewski, not Dean Smith, not John Thompson. And certainly not Craig Esherick.

What needs to be changed -- in addition to the coach -- is the culture. All the secrecy and paranoia and sanctimony that worked for Thompson didn't work for Esherick and will not work for whoever succeeds him. John Thompson III is a very good young coach, but it says here he's crazy to try to step into his father's shoes at the school where he became an icon. Johnny Dawkins lacks head coaching experience, but so did Roy Williams when he got to Kansas. Dawkins would be a breath of fresh air, a local kid who has learned a lot sitting next to Krzyzewski the last seven years. There are others: Billy Taylor, the 30-year-old Notre Dame grad who turned around Lehigh, is going to be a big-time head coach someplace at some point in the near future. What about Joe Scott? If you can win at Air Force, why can't you win at Georgetown?

The large point is this: Georgetown can get a very good coach in spite of the fall it has taken. A good coach wins wherever he goes, regardless of the circumstances. During the 1980s, while Georgetown was one of the rulers of college basketball, two of the more downtrodden programs in college basketball were Oklahoma State and Stanford. Then Eddie Sutton and Mike Montgomery arrived.

Or, closer to home, consider Maryland basketball in the spring of 1989. The school was still reeling from the death of Len Bias and about to face a monumental NCAA probation for violations committed under Bob Wade. In Gary Williams's fourth season, buffeted by the probation, a year off TV and the resulting inevitable recruiting gap, Maryland was 2-14 in the ACC.

"At that moment, I think you could make the case that Maryland was the worst job in the ACC," Williams said years later. It isn't the worst job anymore. There's no reason why Georgetown can't be a good job again too. The right coach will make it a good job.

[EastStang]

To add fuel to the fire. John Thompson made a name for himself as a high school coach at St. Anthony's in DC. This gave him instant access to the DC players. However, his first year at Georgetown he took the team to the NIT. His best team featured a young man from the Ilsands via. New England named Ewing. After Ewing, it became easier to recruit for him. This led to Iverson, Mourning, Mutombo, etc. coming to Georgetown. But the key is the right guy for the team that is already in place when the coach arrives. Look at the job Drew did at Baylor with the team he inherited there. Success opens doors. That is why I want our Committee to take their time and really decide which candidate can make the 2004-2005 Mustangs a winner (not the 2006-2007 Mustangs).

[ponyboy]

Wait a minute. I'm now very confused. This discussion implies that coaching matters. But Stallion says that it doesn't and, as he reminds us every chance he gets, he's much much smarter than everyone else on this board.

[mrydel]

I certainly do not need to speak for Stallion, he is articulate enough, BUT, I think you will find that he has consistantly said that it does not matter who is the coach if you can not compete on a level playing field. Anyone who does not understand that has not followed SMU sports for the last 20 to 30 years. Ponyboy needs to take the chip off of his shoulder and realize that our problems are far deeper than just the right coach. I honestly feel that if the field were level, we could have a much better discussion on what high caliber coach we should be recruiting rather than which assistant might give it a shot.

[ponyboy]

So you're implying then that both recruiting and coaching matter? That both are necessary conditions to winning? How could that be?

[EastStang]

A major problem is that our juniors and seniors can't seem to beat WAC teams with bunches of JUCO juniors and seniors. Stallion feels that gives other teams an advantage across the board. Until last year we couldn't even talk to partial qualifiers, and we couldn't talk to kids who were not eligible for admission to SMU. At least those rules have changed. Now we have one big hurdle which seems to be the inability to admit JUCO's due to the non-transferability of their hours. I agree that we need some athlete friendly majors (not crib courses, but courses that might be relevent to their needs later in life). PE is an example since many young athletes want to go into coaching and they have taken many prerequisites for a PE major in JUCO. I do not agree that we should sink to the levels of Oklahoma State (where Dexter Manley stayed eligible for four years when he couldn't read or write). Lastly, I do not agree with Stallion that JUCO players are a panacea. They help fill holes, but they are not the total package. What I would like to know and no one has yet answered the question is how a non-qualifier attended a year at St. Joseph's (an eastern private school) without any scholarship when is family is from a less than rich part of P.G. County, MD. This is one of the knotty questions that no one ever seems to be able to answer.