Ho-hum: Kentucky is Looking For a New Coach

By now, you probably have heard the biggest news in college basketball aside from the regional semifinals.  It hasn’t exactly been buried, and in fact there was a lot of buzz about it on the day in between games at one regional site.  But my reaction to it is decidedly different.

I say, ho-hum.  The Kentucky head coaching job is open once again.

Even in the days leading up to Billy Gillispie’s firing, there was plenty of speculation as to who will succeed him as the word was he would be out at the end of the season.  Some of the usual big names surfaced quickly: Billy Donovan, Tom Izzo and Jay Wright to name a few.  A dark horse whose name hasn’t been mentioned nearly as much is Travis Ford.  Donovan has already said he’s not interested.  Of the names I just listed, the only one for whom the move would appear to make much sense is Ford, a Kentucky alum and one the fans would surely love.  The other three would, in my mind, be crazy to take the job, no matter how many dollars the school throws at them.

Why is that?  It’s simple: being the head coach at Kentucky isn’t the best job in the world anymore.  It’s not a gig that some of the best coaches in the country would run people over to get to.  Donovan has a better job right now; he’s won two national titles at Florida and makes perfectly good money.  Izzo has Michigan State on a roll and has won a national title and might get to another Final Four; he’s beloved in East Lansing.  Wright is a Philadelphia guy and basically living the dream as the head coach of Villanova.  He’s a Big 5 guy whose team has dominated the city in recent years in addition to its NCAA Tournament success.

“I’m happy to be at Villanova. I don’t want to be anywhere else,” Wright said Friday afternoon.  “I don’t want my name mentioned anywhere. I love Villanova. I’ve got a great athletic director, great president. As long as those guys are there, I’m good.”

Simply put, Wright has a better job.  He said he’s flattered that his name is getting mentioned, but it goes no further than that.

Sure, Kentucky has all kinds of tradition.  We know about the national championships and Final Fours.  We know it’s the all-time winningest program in Division I history.  We know that this year was the first time since 1979 that the Wildcats were in the NIT.  And it’s well-documented that the great success the program has had breeds expectations of that same level of success, which is a major reason Gillispie doesn’t have a job now after just two seasons at the helm.  That’s where this gets a little dicey.

It’s great for a program to have a high standard, because in life you should always aim high.  You don’t want to set a low goal, and especially when you’ve had the kind of success Kentucky has had over the years.  But at some point, reality comes into play and that becomes problematic.  The reality is twofold: the difficulty of winning and the landscape of today.

Winning and losing is the biggest dividing line in sports.  A team can be so close, within a razor-thin margin, and lose a game; but if they did a little more, enough to win the game, would they be a better team by so much?  On the bottom line, they would look like it, but that doesn’t always tell us the story.  That same team that was so close could easily beat another team that might be better than the one they lost to.

But more to the point, winning is far from easy.  Fans and those who play or are otherwise a part of programs like Kentucky, North Carolina or Duke, much like those of professional teams that have won a lot like the Yankees or Steelers, can almost take winning for granted.  It’s as if people forget that it’s not easy.  In fact, doing the kind of consistent winning that the aforementioned teams, and many others have done, is quite remarkable, even if it isn’t punctuated with championships left and right.  A great example is the Buffalo Bills losing four straight Super Bowls – just getting to four in a row is an amazing feat considering what it takes to get there.

Any coach who’s been to a Final Four and returned much of that team the following season can attest to how difficult it is to get back the next season, because so many factors come into play.  These are human beings, after all; if we were talking about robots, things would be different.

Kentucky fans want Final Fours and national championships.  That’s great, but is a Sweet 16 so bad?  Is a first round exit in the NCAA Tournament so bad if it comes at the hands of a better team, perhaps in a down year for the program?  In fact, is it really a terrible thing if every so often, a program fields a team that’s worthy of the NIT instead of the NCAA?  There are programs that would be ecstatic to be in the NIT.

The expectations of teams have gotten out of hand because of the kind of mindset this alludes to.  Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon has addressed it a couple of times in recent days as he has been reminded that this is the first time the Panthers have made it to the Elite 8 amidst a tremendous run of success for the program.  His words in response to being asked if he felt relieved about not having to answer questions about it anymore are worth heeding.

“I think it’s an interesting thing. I know there’s about 330 programs that would like to ask that question and call the Sweet 16 like a bad thing,” said Dixon.

Asked about it a day before the game, he had similar sentiments, in case anyone things he may have changed his tune: “I’ve always looked at it, if it was easy to get to the Sweet 16 more teams would do what we’ve done.”

Sure, they want a Final Four and a national championship, but if neither happens, is a Sweet 16 run so bad?

The more pressing issue is the current college basketball landscape.  Kentucky’s tradition is wonderful, even better if you’re a Wildcat fan.  But nowadays, that doesn’t matter very much to young players and isn’t a major recruiting draw.  Young players want things that many other programs can give them, and that’s something that neither athletic director Mitch Barnhart nor the next head coach of the Wildcats can do anything about.

Young players want to play at a high level; for the elite players that are good enough, there are six high-major conferences in Division I that have a total of 72 schools besides the one in Lexington.  That’s before we also get into those outside such conferences that play a high level of basketball, such as Memphis, Gonzaga and Xavier.  There are several conferences right around the same level of the BCS conferences.

Young players want to play on national television.  That opportunity can come anywhere, especially in the major conferences.  Additionally, a number of mid-major conferences have increased their national television slate consistently in recent years.  A young man doesn’t have to go to Duke, North Carolina or Kentucky to be on national television regularly.

Young players want to go to the NBA.  Kentucky has nearly a dozen active NBA players, but they haven’t exactly been a major NBA lottery factory of late.  The last lottery pick to play for the Wildcats was Derek Anderson in 1997, following Ron Mercer earlier that year.

Young players want to play a lot, and right away.  That opportunity can come just about anywhere and varies depending on a team’s personnel situation.

Young players want to play in a great facility.  Numerous programs have great facilities, including new practice facilities.  In fact, an arms race has been developing for several years with practice facilities.  It’s to the point where a facility that’s in its teenage years is almost considered out-dated, which is absurd.

Some young players like the chance to be part of a tradition like that at Kentucky.  But nowadays, that often ranks far down the priority scale for them.  In some cases, a program that has had plenty of success has had it quietly, or had its best success so long ago, that it’s not easily remembered.  Fittingly enough, one coach mentioned as a possible successor for Gillispie knows this quite well.  When asked if he ever uses Villanova’s national championship back in 1985 as a recruiting tool, Wright talked about this changing landscape.

“In recruiting, you can’t really talk about that anymore because to kids they know about I think they know about two or three years back, they know who the players are,” said Wright.  “We talk more about, in recruiting, maybe Kyle Lowry, Randy Foye, the final 8 team.  And even that team now, believe it or not, now in recruiting, that final 8 team, they don’t really know. They know that Randy Foye, and Kyle are in the NBA, but in recruiting it’s a really short window that they remember.”

Indeed, none of the current Villanova players were even born when they won the national championship.

For Kentucky, the short window that today’s young players remember doesn’t work in their favor.  The Kentucky these young men remember isn’t the Kentucky that’s constantly winning SEC titles and going to the Final Four.  The Wildcats haven’t won the SEC Tournament since 2004 and were last in the Final Four in 1998, when they won the national championship in Tubby Smith’s first year.

In his statement announcing that Gillispie is no longer the head coach at Kentucky, Barnhart made a noteworthy comment about the job: “The University of Kentucky and its dedicated and passionate fans deserve a coach that understands that this is not just another coaching job.”  The current landscape in college basketball suggests otherwise.  That’s a large reason why several people mentioned for that job already have a better one.