ESPN on re-tread CUSA coaches, and the atmosphere at USM
Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 2:31 pmhttp://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/s ... id=4940844
Lots of info on Doh, nothing new though.
USM's atmophere sounds worse than Moody.
Lots of info on Doh, nothing new though.
USM's atmophere sounds worse than Moody.
HATTIESBURG, Miss. -- Your first thought as you approach Southern Mississippi's Reed Green Coliseum: The Golden Eagles play in a yurt.
Your second thought, as you enter the gym: The environmentally conscious, amenity-eschewing people who live in actual yurts would be aesthetically offended. The walls, presumably, were once yellow but now sit on the color spectrum somewhere between dirty mustard and old oatmeal. Three-quarters of the seats are old wooden bleachers that have seen a few decades worth of derriere wear and tear.
The lighting would be welcome in prison.
Thirty minutes before tipoff, 19 people are in the stands -- a pack of kids behind the basket, a collection of older folks toting their own chair backs opposite the benches, and a handful of locals spread across the rest of the building.
Student section? Haven't found it.
Pep band? No sign.
Cheerleaders? Not yet.
By tip, the place fills out a little, and when the players take the court -- with a recording of their fight song piped over the loudspeaker (which, more accurately, is a kind of a quiet speaker) and dry ice foaming at their feet -- there is a smattering of distracted applause.
Eustachy and Doherty are joined by Houston's Tom Penders, who was dogged by player scandals in his previous stops at Texas and George Washington; UAB's Mike Davis, who stepped down from pressure-packed Indiana only four years after taking the Hoosiers to the national title game; and Rice's Ben Braun, who went from Pac-10 Coach of the Year at Cal to one league win with the Owls last season.
If you mix in the football side of things, there's Mike Price, who was fired at Alabama after allegedly partying at a strip club and is now at UTEP, and George O'Leary, whose résumé-fudging knocked him from Notre Dame to Central Florida.
Even the conference's most successful coaching alum, John Calipari, came to Memphis only after crashing and burning in the NBA.
"I've sat in conference meetings and thought, 'This is some frigging broken-down, dead refugee camp,'" Eustachy said. "It's kind of like Afghanistan."
