I’m not sure they set their sights too high. It took Arizona giving Lloyd a huge raise and agreeing to a fairly unprecedented extended athletic department restructuring to keep him from leaving for our job.
He took less than we were offering, and I don't think his desire was to not have to report to an AD, I think it was that he didn't want to have to deal with his AD. While you can argue, effectively, that those are the same, I still think it's different.
“But, realizing that there would not be enough money to field a team, they had to make a move. ”
Yeah, I’d frame it that Lloyd hates his AD, we offered more money, Arizona has an uncertain financial future, and he still said no. They only had to restructure who he reported to because he hated his boss.
Unless you did what it took to get the guy you wanted.
Yeah, seems that the general consensus was that we would have no problem obtaining a top five coach. It doesn’t look like that will likely happen. We may get a high upside up-and-comer, but I don’t think we are going to roll out a top five coach next year, and we may spend $15MM in buyouts to get there. Donors do not have unlimited funds and there are competing priorities, and Belichick is a considerable drain on resources. Luckily, we have a PE guy in charge who can leverage our financial future to the gills.
Many fans are also believing 2 and 4 to be true. We'll see.
That Belichick hire was was such a disaster.
I agree with you on that.
When you have the best job opening currently on the market, you have to make the dream options say no first, IMO. Like, i never thought there was a snowball's chance in hell Brad Stevens was coming here, but I understand why they called him to make him say that. Our hire will be a "Tier III" target only in the sense that our Tier 1 targets in particular were shooting for the moon. We are still likely to get the best coach who moves jobs this offseason. It's not like targets are turning us down to take another job; they're just not leaving their current jobs.
If these assumptions, in particular, were being made by the people running the search, then I agree that was the wrong way to be approaching things. But I also think we had to move on from Hubert regardless.
I don't think this was clear at all. He did do a better job winning big games this year compared to in previous years, but the VCU game was a vintage illustration of the coaching mistakes that have characterized his career - coaching scared/tight with a lead, defaulting to riding his best lineup into the ground without trusting reserves, unable to get the team to execute successfully in the biggest crunch-time possessions. Also worth noting that Hubert had more NCAAT wins in his first year as coach than he did the next four years combined. You just can't look at a coach who only got higher than a 6 seed once in all 5 years and only got past the first round of the tournament once in his last four seasons as being on the rise - especially when it seemed highly likely that next year's team would be worse than this year's, even before the booster revolt.
I don't think he was any better, either. There was a pattern to most of the losses. They either came out flat and got way behind in the first half or they had a big lead in the second half and collapsed. Very few of the losses were back and forth and close throughout the game.
Serious question: What qualities or absence in quality does coach possess to create those types of performances? I would default to not being able to to make consistently strong in-game adjustments.
I'm hoping for McCollum at this point.
Hard NO on Oats, Golden, Drew, Hurley.
Surprised to not hear McCasland's name more prominently, but he's always been a Texas guy. McCollum has a good track record at lower levels. Byington seems like a best case scenario at this point, and that's gonna be expensive.
