Sources: SMU offers coaching job to Doherty

[MustangIcon]

Agreed Big Easy. I simply don't think Doherty would sign anything less than a 5 year deal. However, it is irrelevant bc there is no way he will stay here that long. I wonder what the over/under in Vegas is on how long till he moves on the another job from SMU (assuming he accepts the job).

[McClown27]

Why is Doherty making facility demands? McClown says facilities don't matter.

I have never said that facilities don't matter. I maintain that facilities should only be built after a program is able to sustain them. Have you been to Ford on Saturdays during the fall. The new football facility has done nothing for our ability to fill the stadium or recruit.

I think Stallion is right, he is asking for changes to the model. No one is gonna demand a new arena with attendance figures like last year, except for certain people on this board. I would tell Doherty that facility improvements would be possible if he achieved success, otherwise they are not sustainable.

[LA_Mustang]

From The Tar Heel Daily-

Being Matt Doherty
Carolina's former coach a mixed bag

In researching the book “True Blue: Matt Doherty Returns To Carolina Basketball” (now, thanks to recent events, available on the bargain table at your local Barnes & Noble) I interviewed dozens of people who knew Matt Doherty well.

Former players, teammates, colleagues, family members, etc. provided insight into the man who, at that time, had been a head coach for a little more than one year.

The picture that slowly came into focus was of a man driven by a fear of failure and possessed more than his share of intelligence, insecurities, ego, and emotion. He deeply cares about his family (in our first interview, he showed up carrying his son Tucker’s Power Rangers backpack) as well as what other people think about him. His attention to detail was incredible, and sometimes bogged him down when attending to more important aspects of his job. It all added up to a seething cauldron of personality that manifested itself as charm and charisma at least as often as it did violent outbursts of anger and frustration.

For every story of a thrown chair, there was a recounting of a time when he gave tickets to students at his radio show. For every use of profanity directed at a player, there was a guy who brought donuts out to students waiting out in the cold for tickets.

As a kid, Doherty was more mature than most, thanks in large part to his being bigger than kids his own age and also due to doting older sisters.

“I really believe his three sisters and his parents had a lot to do with (him being poised),” Bob McKillop told me. McKillop was Doherty’s high school coach at Holy Trinity and later hired him as and assistant at Davidson. “What they did was they opened up relationships for him with their friends. So he was rarely hanging out with guys his own age. He was always hanging out with guys older than him. And primarily because he was competitive enough to find himself on the court with people older than him. I think that that really helped develop that sense of poise that he had."

From the start, Doherty was driven to succeed. He studied older, better players. He took notes at summer camps. Confidence did not come easily, despite his obvious physical talents and hard work. “I remember how upset he was when he learned I scored higher on the SAT,” says another former major college player who was a Long Island rival in high school. “He quizzed me for a long time on how I could have done better than he did.”

His confidence took a serious hit in his first on-court experience at Carolina.

“I came here in the summer to work, to get a summer job and to play basketball,” Doherty recalled. “I was planning on doing it for about three weeks. And I got homesick. I had a girlfriend at home. I remember the first shot I took in Carmichael. I was playing against Dudley Bradley, (Tommy) LaGarde, (John) Kuester, (Mitch) Kupchak, Walter Davis, (Mike) O'Koren, and I got out on the floor, nervous as heck, and the first shot I threw up was an airball. And you know, you start to say, ‘Oh my gosh, can I play at this level’. I didn't realize, well, these guys are the pros. These are the best players in the world. Guys like Kuester, O'Koren, Kupchak, they really made me feel comfortable and gave me confidence. I fell like I got better in that week.”

Whenever he was backed into a corner and the fear of failure raised its head, Doherty returned to the one thing he could always count on: outworking the other guy. He pushed himself as hard as any Carolina player, finally earning a spot as a starter going into his sophomore season. It was that season, of course, that UNC would win its first national title for coach Dean Smith.

Two years later, during what should have been a triumphant senior season, Doherty suffered from a serious case of the shooting yips. He consulted a sport psychologist in the hopes of overcoming it. In private, teammates called him the “Human Pump Fake.” At the end of the season, however, he got a measure of satisfaction, hitting a shot against Duke to send the game to overtime in his final home game. The Heels would go on to beat the Blue Devils.

It would be the last success Doherty would taste for a long time.

A loss to Indiana in the NCAA Tournament started the slide. Being chosen in the sixth round of the NBA Draft (on a courtesy selection by George Karl of the Cleveland Cavaliers) stunned him. He found out moments before he was scheduled to speak at the Campbell College summer camp.

“I'm in front of 200, 300 campers and I'm starting to lose it. That was not what I wanted to hear. I'm fighting back tears, trying to keep my composure, trying to talk to these kids and all I can think about was Cleveland Cavaliers? They were terrible. Sixth round? Nobody makes it in the sixth round. I thought I'd be drafted higher.”

Doherty remembers well the moment Karl tapped him on the shoulder a few moths later during the Cavs’ camp and asked him if he had considered any other careers. He hadn’t. He tried Wall Street, because he thought it would be cool to tell people he worked there. He ignored basketball.

“I did feel like basketball let me down. I equate it to a girl who walks out of your life. You say well, I don't want any part of her again. I said OK, if you're going to do that to me I'm going to walk away from you, too.”

Slowly, the game crept back into his life. Finding he had no passion for Wall Street, he began to volunteer as a production assistant on basketball broadcasts. He left New York with no job and moved to Charlotte. He floundered there, as well, selling commercial real estate and finally coaching AAU ball. He landed a gig as a radio color commentator on Davidson games. When McKillop returned as head coach at Davidson (he had been an assistant a few years earlier) Doherty jumped into the coaching world with both feet.

Burning with a desire to prove himself again, Doherty worked around the clock to put Davidson basketball back on the map. Three years into it, he convinced Roy Williams to interview him for a slot on the Kansas staff. Sensing the move that could make or break his relatively new career, Doherty was incredibly nervous when interviewing at the Final Four in Minneapolis.

“He was very intense,” said Roy Williams of that meeting. “I have heard him say several times about how he was so nervous. But I really didn’t think of it as being nervous, I took it as a positive of how intense he was because of the degree to which he wanted the job.”

Doherty got the job and began a seven-year period in which he would do anything and everything to help the Jayhawks succeed and, in the process, build his own career. But his inherent insecurities never left him. Other college coaches would have fun with him, playing on his intensity and anxiety by “leaking” information to him that a Kansas recruit had been spotted wearing a UCLA hat or a mother of a recruit was driving a new SUV provided by a rival school. Doherty would look stunned and then race into a hallway to call the recruit as the other assistants chuckled.

Other stories reveal other aspects of his still-evolving character. Williams recalled one that shows the two sides of Doherty: his quickness to anger and his ability to put it behind him.

“In St. Louis, his first year here, he called a foul as an official during the course of a practice that Richard Scott -- one of our starters, a junior, really good player -- didn’t like, so Richard gives him a dirty look. Then Matt yells at Richard. I remember I stopped practice and I yelled at both of them. I said 'here I am, trying to get to the Final Four and I've got to worry about people's feelings. It's not a problem, Richard, for him to correct you. Coach Doherty, it's not a problem for him to be stubborn and give you a dirty look. He may not think he did something wrong. He may think your call was a bad call, but there's no problem with that, but I'm tired of worrying about people's feelings. We're trying to go to a Final Four. We're in this thing together.' And boom, instead of going over to the side and pouting, he (Doherty) was right back into it immediately. He walked over past Richard two minutes later and patted him on the back and said 'Let's go'. And I think that focus is something that's been important to him.”

In the spirit of always looking for another mountain to climb, Doherty began to set his sights on a head coaching position. Torn by his desire to grow his career but wanting to make certain he made the right decision, Doherty flirted with a number of jobs, but none felt right. Manhattan, Long Beach State, even UNC-Charlotte.

Then came Notre Dame. He got the job a day after Digger Phelps went on television and announced to the world that he had no chance. He did it because he convinced former Athletic Director Mike Wadsworth about his vision for the program, about building a “Dean Smith franchise” in South Bend.

In his one season at Notre Dame, the Irish had great successes (most wins in over a decade, a defeat of Ohio State in the first game, an NIT runner-up finish). Doherty earned a reputation as a disciplinarian who would push his players hard. In one practice, they did nothing but run sprints, 304 of them. The Irish players wore the number on their shoes like a badge of honor.

But underneath the surface, players bristled at Doherty’s style. One of them, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “It’s like he’s bipolar. One minute he’s this great guy, acting like your best friend; the next, he’s screaming at you and throwing you out of practice. You never knew what you were going to get.”

As equally telling about Doherty’s personality is how -- and with whom -- he built his coaching staff. Doug Wojcik was a former Naval Academy player and assistant with a reputation as a dogged recruiter; Fred Quartlebaum was a late hire with an engaging nature who had already bounced around to three different jobs in three years; Bob MacKinnon was a basketball lifer, a former ballboy for whatever team his dad was coaching in college or the pros who had been pushed around by the game somewhat in his own coaching life; and David Cason, a young guy who was just learning the business.

All were (and are) quality coaches and men of integrity, but none had ever tasted the big time as players or coaches. In other words, they owed Doherty a great deal for plucking them from obscurity and placing them in high profile, well-paying jobs.

What it says about Doherty – other than his respect for their ability to do the job – is that he didn’t want experienced, well-known coaches on his staff who might question his decisions or dilute his power.

He wanted guys who owed him.

The staff he assembled at Notre Dame and fought so hard to bring with him to Chapel Hill would never be anything but loyal to -- and somewhat fearful of -- the guy in the corner office. Doherty ran the office with an iron fist. For example: one of his rules was that he wanted no one to go out for lunch.

At North Carolina, his on-the-court emotion was obvious from the first day. A few minutes into his first game as the Heels’ coach, he received a technical foul. Fans who longed to see that kind of passion cheered.

Over the course of a three-year period, however, that emotion manifested itself in negative ways. Doherty often berated athletics staff members for small errors or transgressions, the kind of things a head coach should not concern himself with. The very same players who appreciated Doherty’s personal touch during the recruiting process -- the UNC staff quickly gained a reputation for their creative recruiting process -- were put off by his wrath on the court once they put on the uniform.

Every coach brings with him to the job a mixed bag of experience, strengths, weaknesses, personality traits, and personality flaws. Many of the same qualities that have been a part of Doherty since his childhood -- intelligence, insecurity, a penchant for hard work, genuine kindness, and an acute fear of failure -- are evident in him today.

From out of that bag, Doherty would have been best served to remember this one nugget that he relayed to me when I asked him, in the middle of one of our lengthy interviews, what he had learned as an assistant at Kansas:

“How to treat people. How to treat your staff. How to treat your players. That they are the most important resource you have.”

[stonedpony]

Screw DISD. Let them get on board or get out of the way. If we're so dependent on them, shame on us. No way Doherty is worried about that nor would he allow himself to be disproportionately dependent on the local yokels.

[nc pony]

Thanks for the great article about Doherty! Personally, I think a little passion and asskicking is just what we need in a new coach. Obviously, we need to change something as we haven't been to the NCAAs since 93. O'Leary's baggage was just as bad if not worse when he got the job at UCF! Sh*t, Bob Huggins is already recruiting top players at K-State. This would be a great, big-name hire for us!

[Stallion]

not so sure how great a job he did recruiting at Florida Atlantic but its worth a comment that he made 13 offers at Florida Atlantic this year according to Rivals and 7 offers were to JC/CC players a another was top a post-graduate Prep. That may tell you the changes in the program he wants to see.

[SMU Football Blog]

not so sure how great a job he did recruiting at Florida Atlantic but its worth a comment that he made 13 offers at Florida Atlantic this year according to Rivals and 7 offers were to JC/CC players a another was top a post-graduate Prep. They may tell you the changes in the program he wants to see.

Ha ha ha. Stallion, you crack me up. Here's a quote of a post of mine on Tuesday in the "Doherty interviews" thread:

And before we begin, yes Stallion, the FAU roster is loaded with transfers, Jucos, and prep school grads.

[Stallion]

Oh I saw it but since he was only at Florida Atlantic for a year I think it is much more relevant to look at the offers he made THIS YEAR. You know always bending over backwards to be fair.

[nc pony]

I don't we would've leaked the story unless we knew he was coming here. Thoughts?

[PonyPride]

"In one practice, they did nothing but run sprints, 304 of them. The Irish players wore the number on their shoes like a badge of honor."

Holy smokes.

[PonyPride]

I don't we would've leaked the story unless we knew he was coming here. Thoughts?

Depends on where the leak was. But Calvin Watkins is a very thorough reporter, and if he believed Coach Doherty had accepted the job, or was close to accepting the job, he would have reported it. At this point, I have to believe Doherty has not yet made a decision. If he had agreed already to accept the job, Calvin either would have reported that or sat on the story until he could confirm what he was hearing. If he didn't report that an offer had been extended, assuming he trusts his sources, he wouldn't be doing his job. But the idea that Doherty is coming is, at this point, still purely speculative.

[nc pony]

thanks pride

[Stallion]

further telling information-Matt Doherty personally signed 5 players in 2005 and they included 3 JC/CC players, 1 Prep player and 1 High School Player. So in all about 66% of the players we know Doherty has offered over the last two years are JC/CC/Prep players. Interesting that we continue to hire ADs and Coaches who quite clearly personally disagree with the SMU Model since the DP. Hmm.

[RE Tycoon]

Interesting that we continue to hire ADs and Coaches who quite clearly personally disagree with the SMU Model since the DP. Hmm.

Interesting how? Interesting that it seems change is afoot? Or, interesting that we are hiring people that like to bang their head against the wall?

[SMU Football Blog]

further telling information-Matt Doherty personally signed 5 players in 2005 and they included 3 JC/CC players, 1 Prep player and 1 High School Player. So in all about 66% of the players we know Doherty has offered over the last two years are JC/CC/Prep players. Interesting that we continue to hire ADs and Coaches who quite clearly personally disagree with the SMU Model since the DP. Hmm.

Yeah, he basically did a complete roster turnover. I looked at briefly earlier in the week and as I recall, it was a lot of those guys that logged heavy minutes.